He's Lost Control
by Fliegendamsel
Summary: "I do have a sister. She's about your age," he went on, studying my face. "If I knew about some older guy, some guy my age, having the kind of thoughts about her, the kind of thoughts I have about you"…his eyes bored into me…"I'd kill him." AH.
1. Chapter 1

**Apologies to Joy Division.**

**I don't own Twilight. I just have dirty thoughts about its characters.**

The music is loud, insistent, infectious.

When I close my eyes I am inside it.

I'm tossing my hair, I'm shaking my hips, I'm moving from side to side, I'm tracing a spirograph circle. I'm dancing in a trance. I am feeling the bass surrounding me and pulsing through me, pulsing through my chest like a heartbeat.

But when I open my eyes I'm suddenly thrust back into reality: I am not a dancing queen, I am an ordinary insignificant dark-haired high school girl with a bulky white cast on one wrist, tagging along to a Seattle nightclub for the first time with three older, curvier, fair-haired, self-possessed beauties: Rosalie Hale, my big brother Emmett's girlfriend; her best friend Tanya Denali; and Tanya's friend Vicky (OK, she is actually a redhead, but close enough). I find I've become a little separated from them on the dance floor, so I shimmy back over towards them. They are grinning at me, not in a mean way, but definitely amused. They are dancing in a circle around their leather bags, like the hen party in that Specials song.

"Go, Bella. Break it down, girl," Rosalie laughs. I laugh back at her and I do break it down, goddamn it, slipping into some aggressive chicken dance–inspired moves and dancing the way I would normally do only in my own living room with the curtains drawn and the stereo cranked up to eleven. I'm making fun of something—myself? Or everyone else in the club? I'm not quite sure.

"Oh my god, Bella, where did you learn to dance like that?" Tanya sounds curious instead of bored like usual.

I don't give her the answer, which is that my mother, Renée, for years was enrolling me in dance class after dance class in a fruitless effort to impart some grace to her clumsy child, but after I had basically flunked out of ballet and then tap and then jazz, she signed me up for afro-haitian dance almost as a joke—but afro-haitian dance and I really hit it off, which was kind of weird considering I am a skinny white girl from Washington State. So I am in my element on the dance floor—but off of it, liable to trip over my own feet and anything else in, or even near, my path. I am kind of a physical idiot-savant that way.

The music changes from something hip-hoppy to something more sultry and Sade-esque, and Rosie and Tanya slip into some fake attention-seeking quasi-lesbian dance thing that makes me want to puke so I tell them I'm off to the bar to get a bottle of water. I am feeling flushed and my top is clinging to my back and underarms, all of which is covered with a sheen of sweat. My thin gray top is a little bit sheer, just showing the camisole I have underneath, but it is long sleeved and it is cotton, sort of hot for this situation. Most of the girls seem to be wearing camisoles only. I was trying to balance out the little black skirt Rosalie lent me to wear tonight, an old one of hers that, for me, is unusually short, exposing my knees—which I've always found to be a little knobbly, so I'm not sure how good an idea this is—and a good couple inches of thigh.

So I'm waiting at the bar to get my bottle of water, and I swear the female bartender is avoiding my eye on purpose, she can probably tell at a glance that I'm underage. Great. Now I'm leaning over the bar and staring at her like a border collie with a tennis ball hoping for a game of fetch but she's helping people who definitely came up after me, when:

"What are you drinking," inquires a velvety voice close to my ear.

I turn my head and find myself looking up at the most handsome guy who has ever spoken to me in person. In fact, I have to internally roll my eyes at the voice in my head that is gushing about how he looks like a Greek god. How clichéd, I think, but between that long, straight Roman nose and that appealingly square jaw and that wild dark blond hair and those light-colored eyes that seem to shine with reflected light and bore straight through me at once…yep, this is exactly what Apollo must look like. You would definitely need to grow bark on your limbs and sprout leaves from your fingers to resist this onslaught of male beauty. Plus, tall…I am standing with both feet on the brass footrest at the base of the bar and still looking _up_ at him, and I'm five foot six. One corner of his mouth is lifted in a slightly hesitant smirk. Oh my god. _OK, Bella, stop looking at his mouth._

"I—I don't know," I stammer, endeavoring to meet his eyes again but finding it difficult or possibly dangerous, like looking directly into the sun. I feel like I am fluttering my lashes in an inane manner.

"You don't know? How many have you had?" he teases.

I giggle, probably sounding drunk despite having drunk nothing but water that night.

Suddenly I hear Rosie's voice echoing in my mind's ear. _Go, Bella. _Trying to be bold, I smile up at him through my lashes and suggest,

"Why don't you choose for me?"

That stops him short. He loses the smirk and seems to suddenly look at me more directly, except that doesn't seem possible, but his look takes on a quality that would be described, in some old noirish detective mystery, as "smoldering." My stomach flops and I feel not only out of my league looks-wise but suddenly very unworldly and inexperienced. I am also suddenly sharply aware that despite his pretty looks, he is exuding _maleness,_ from his appealingly cocky manner of engaging me, a complete stranger, to his stubble-darkened chin to his broad shoulders. And this look he is giving me—I couldn't say in this half-light exactly what color his eyes are but they darken in a way I have only ever read about in schlocky romance novels. On some instinctual level I can tell he likes that coy suggestion I just tossed at him. When Jacob gives me a direct look like that it reminds me of a familiar warm brown-eyed puppy, but this, well, I ain't used to this, with boys my age. _Hm. Boys my age._

"Mm," he hums, which makes my stomach flop again. "How about a lemon drop, something sweet and tart?"

He continues, "…for the beautiful klutz."

I gape at him. "How did you know…" I stop myself before actually finishing out loud, "_that I'm a klutz?"_

He glances down at my cast. "Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but how did you get that?"

My face goes hot. Obviously I am not about to tell him_ that_ embarrassing story.

He smirks again, enjoying my confusion. "A lemon drop, then? But maybe that's too risky, maybe something without a "drop" involved would be better." He's looking at the cast again.

I feel an urge to crack him on the head with it, or possibly grab his collar and start kissing him.

"I'll try the lemon drop," I say brazenly, tugging my sleeve further down over the yellow wristband that marks me as an Under Twenty-One.

Apollo, or Adonis, or whatever his name is waggles his fingers at the bartender chick, who immediately drops everything to come over and see what he wants. I stare at those long, slender fingers, imagining them tracing up my thigh, and then I consider this unusual reaction in amazement. I am totally losing my mind. He orders a lemon drop for me and a Hale's Pale Ale for himself.

The girl behind the bar goes to work on the lemon drop first, raising the cocktail shaker over her shoulder and shaking it so frigging thoroughly that her boobs are jiggling and bouncing all over the place, before pouring it into the sugar-rimmed glass and handing it to Apollo, who is handing it to me when another hand intercepts the glass. A pale white hand. Belonging to a redhead. A loudmouth redhead. Vicky uses that loud mouth to call out to the barmaid that she should "change his drink to a Kamakazi 'cause he is about to get shot down." Then she turns to Apollo, hands the drink back to him, and says sweetly,

"Sorry, my little friend here is not allowed to talk to strange men, let alone take drinks from them." I am already ready to sink into a hole in the floor but she punctuates this statement by holding up my good arm and pulling down my sleeve to expose the yellow bracelet.

"Come on, my dear," she says, placing her arm around my shoulders and steering me away from the bar. Total humiliation. I glance back at Apollo, who is biting his lip and looking amused. Vicky is hissing in my ear.

"He's a little old for you, isn't he?"

**Author's note: Um, in addition to the age difference (greatly reduced from the original!), I think this story is headed into exploring some rawther controversial themes that kind of caught my interest in the books...so if you have delicate sensibilities or are underage please bail (and for god's sake, kids, don't model your behavior on that of anyone in this story). OK fair warning.**


	2. Chapter 2

"_Beggin' on my knees, baby won't you please...run your fingers through my hair…"_

I am listening to my feet pounding on the track, or rather feeling my feet pounding on the track while Joan Jett is banging her head in my earbuds.

A warm August sun is beating down on my back, and I'm grateful that Dad let me come up to Seattle so early to settle in at Emmett's place before school begins. In a month or two this track will be closed; Emmett says the dirt track is open only for a few months in the summertime, but will turn to muck over the autumn and winter and I'll have to move indoors to Dempsey if I want to run on a track. But for now Seattle is soaking up the summer sunshine and showing itself for the beautiful city it is, lakes sparkling, ferries crisscrossing the Sound, shops bustling. Emmett's place is great. He's had several years, first as an undergrad at U-Dub and now as a grad student, to work his way up to pretty comfy accommodations in Ravenna, a nice neighborhood close to campus. He's renting a cute three-bedroom bungalow, which he shares with a fellow grad student, Jasper, and now me. In he past he's been able to sublet two bedrooms, though, instead of giving one to me, which is going to make things a little tight but I do have some scholarship money left after tuition and books, so I can chip in, and Dad is helping too. Rosalie spends a lot of nights over there as well, and there seems to be a constant bustle of friends dropping in and hanging out. Emmett was always gregarious, but he's been out of the house so long I'd kind of forgotten. Life's been a lot quieter at home in Port Angeles since I turned eleven and Em went away to college.

"Hey!" someone calls. I look up and see _him, _running the wrong way on the track, about to pass by me. Or maybe I'm running the wrong way. I yank out my earbuds. He smiles and starts running backward, keeping pace with me, and puts his hands in the air on either side of his head, in a gesture of surrender. "Don't shoot."

"What?" I am too flustered at this sudden apparition to understand what he's talking about. I can feel myself blushing furiously, as if he could somehow tell how many times my thoughts have turned to him over the past few days. Green, his eyes are green. And his hair…it's not just dark blond, like I thought in the club, it's the prettiest shades of dark gold and reddish brown all mixed up.

He turns around so he's loping along alongside me. "The Kamakazi thing."

"Oh…that." The humiliation has worn off enough that I burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of it. He grins broadly at me, his smile bright like the sun. I like how his canine teeth are a little pointy. I wonder how old he is. He's not _that _old. Maybe he's Emmett's age…Emmett is twenty-four.

"So you go to school here?" he asks, craning his neck to look at the back of my gray running shorts…_what the heck is he doing, is he checking out my ass?_….oh, wait, my ass has the word "HUSKIES" splashed across it in purple capital letters.

"I'm about to start."

"You're a freshman?" he suggests.

"Well…" Before I can explain, I am _lurching_ forward, oh god, I can't catch myself and regain balance. I am about to be sprawled spread-eagle on the track—but instantly his arm is around my waist on the one side and grasping my right arm on the other, so I don't crash to the ground. However, in a frantic effort to avoid falling onto my already-broken wrist, which would be a disaster, I have swung my left arm up and am now smashing myself in the chin with my cast. It takes a few moments for the burning sensation to start.

He's holding me pressed close to his side—my whole body is tingling as if with an electric current. We grind to a halt and he lets go of my waist, stooping down to look at my face. He's still gripping my arm.

"Oh, shit, your chin is bleeding," he mutters, steering me towards the grass. "Sit down," he instructs me, and in a moment we're sitting on the grass and he has his sweat towel pressed against my chin. I can taste a little blood in my mouth and it's making me feel slightly woozy. My chin hurts like a mother, and I screw my eyes shut. He puts his hand on my shoulder, which instantly calms me. His hand feels big, encompassing my shoulder. "Just lie back for a minute."

_Lie back…of course I'll lie back, sir. Would you like to lie on top of me?_ I notice I have my knees pressed tightly together, as if I don't trust myself to keep them together. I also notice he has a distinctive way of talking, not quite an accent—he sounds totally American, that's not it—but an undercurrent of _some_thing. I open one eye and peek at him.

"This is mortifying," I comment.

"Don't worry about it." He smiles, then starts chuckling. "You know, I was kidding the other night when I called you a klutz. But now I see I'm going to have to revise my opinion."

"I'm glad I amuse you," I say dryly.

"I didn't think you were a klutz. I saw you dancing." He says this in a confessional manner. I'm confused again and remain quiet. "I…I looked for you again…after. I wanted to know your name." He's reclining on one elbow next to me, holding the towel pressed against my chin and looking at me. I have to stop breathing this hard. I am hoping he thinks it was the excitement of the near-fall.

In classic Bella fashion I cover my thrilled embarrassment with babbling. "Oh, yeah, we left pretty soon…after…. Our friend Tanya wasn't feeling well. My brother was supposed to meet us there so when he showed up he just took us home."

He shoots me a shocked look. "What's your name?" he demands.

My confusion is increasing. I open my mouth to answer but before I can, I hear someone bellowing my name across the track. It's Emmett, come to pick me up. Is it already four o'clock? I take the towel from my rescuer and sit up, looking at my watch. Emmett comes jogging up to us. "Bella…what happened? Hey, Edward, what are _you_ doing here?"

_Edward_ and I stare at each other.

"You know my brother?" I stammer.

"He's your _brother_?"

"So…you guys have met," Emmett remarks.

"No," we both answer at the same time. Emmett frowns.

"I mean, we just met," I mumble. _Change subject. Change subject._ "I tripped. How's my chin look?" I ask Emmett, removing the towel. Edward peers at it.

"It's still bleeding. It looks kinda deep, you might need stitches. We should probably take you to the emergency room."

"Bella, I _told_ you that this was a bad idea, going running with that cast on." Emmett is getting all huffy. "Don't worry about it, Edward, I've got her. This shit happens all the time. You go back to your run. Thanks, man."

_Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. _I replace the towel against my chin. Now Emmett is helping me up.

"What else are you hiding from me, Emmett?" Edward is saying, a tinge of mockery in his tone. "I didn't even know you _had _a sister."

"Like I'd tell _you_," Emmett shoots back. I glance quickly at Emmett but he's giving Edward a toothy grin.

"I can take her if you like, my car's right over there."

_Yes, please._

"'S OK, I've got it. Later, Cullen. March, Bells." Great. Once again someone is treating me like a kindergartener in front of him. And calling me "Bells." _Ding dong._

He watches us walk away and then calls after us. "Bye, McCarty. Bye, _Miss _McCarty."

I look back over my shoulder at him and roll my eyes. Once we're in the Crapmobile, as Emmett's car is affectionately known, I restrain myself for as many minutes as possible before asking how he knows Edward.

"Well, originally, he was my calculus T.A. A few years ago, when I was an undergrad."

"Oh." _Oh._

"I forget how we started hanging out…it was after that. We had some friends in common. And also…" he glances at me. "Well, nevermind."

"What?"

"Mm," he grunts, dismissively. Must be something bad.

"Why'd you say you wouldn't tell him you had a sister?" I press.

He sighs. "OK, he and Tanya are fuck buddies or . . . something. It's sort of a bad situation. I guess she wants it to be more and he doesn't. She says he's an emotional vampire, or some such pop psy gobbledygook. I mean, it's fine, we all hang out a lot together and it's not really an overt issue, but she's always complaining about it to Rosalie in private. I shouldn't really be telling you this."

My heart freezes. A minute ago I was floating on air, turning over the events of the last half-hour in my mind, replaying everything he said, how he looked at me, how my entire body reacted with pleasurable anticipation to his nearness. And now this. Tanya is a beautiful, statuesque strawberry blond with a slightly haughty manner, oozing self-confidence. How can I compete with that. What am I even saying? I don't want to _compete_ with that_._

Emmett is going on. "I mean, it's been off and on for a while with those two. I guess he's got it, his love life, more under control than it used to be…but, um, he has no trouble getting girls, and I don't think he really respects women." He pauses, then revises. "Maybe that's not fair, but at any rate it always seems like there's some bad drama going on with him and some chick or other."

Gah. Bad drama. I can suddenly foresee some bad drama…

"Do people know they're together?"

He considers this. "Well, Tanya is a serious person, she teaches, so no, she doesn't let it all hang out. And they're not exactly _together. _Obviously Rosalie knows all about it, they're close."

I am thinking about Vicky. She was the only one who saw that thing at the bar… she laughingly _told _the others about it but apparently didn't recognize Edward (and I later asked Rosalie not to say anything to Emmett about me and this older stranger, knowing how protective of me he is). Is Vicky _close _to Tanya, does she know, does she come around and hang out too? Bad enough that I am apparently going to get an eyeful of Edward with his fuck buddy ("...or something...") hanging out around the house, but is there an impending blow-up when Vicky informs Tanya that her fuck-buddy-that-she-wants-more-from was buying me a drink?

"What about her other friends?" I prod, feeling increasingly panicky.

"What do you mean?" he turns his eyes from the road to look inquiringly at me.

I back off from the question I am really asking. "Uh…I mean, shouldn't they tell her to have more self-respect?"

He nods approvingly. "Yeah…Rosalie's told her so many times and it's been an off-and-on thing, but she can't seem to disengage. And I don't mean to bad-mouth him, not at all, he's a great guy. I like hanging out with him. He's fucking smart. Scary smart."

He adds, shrugging, "She's a big girl."

I lean back as we pull up to the emergency entrance at the hospital. I can see how you'd be sucked into that…to get close but never close enough. The idea of having him so close is bewitching.


	3. Chapter 3

The following weekend, one of my fears is realized, but the other one vaporizes, at least temporarily.

Emmett has invited a bunch of friends over for a Saturday afternoon barbecue. I am in the kitchen with him that morning, helping him make marinade for ribs and shuck corn, and faux-nonchalantly asking for the rundown on who all is coming.

He rattles off a list of names: Jasper of course, Rosalie, Sam, Peter, Charlotte, Jared, Emily, Edward, Tanya of course, Ben… My heart sinks—both due to the fact I am going to see them both together, and due to his casual connection of their names. _Crap._

"What about Vicky?" I ask, waiting for the nail in my coffin.

"Nah, Vicky's gone," he replies. "She's spending a semester in London."

I suck in a deep breath of relief. I had been anticipating having to attempt to control someone else's observations and conversation, which seemed futile of course; merely having to control myself seemed like a cakewalk.

Turns out controlling yourself is not as easy as it sounds when you're in the throes of a massive crush.

The weather is cooperating nicely, and people start turning up around four, bearing bottles of wine and six-packs of microbrew.

When he comes in, I spot him at once. It's impossible to keep my eyes from being drawn to him. He's wearing a short-sleeved button-down shirt, long shorts, and sandals, looking both put-together and summery. I'm sitting on one of the barstools facing into the kitchen, drinking Orangina from a fat, round bottle and chatting with Jasper; I can feel my face brighten, bracing myself for a teasing remark about the bandage on my chin.

Which doesn't come.

He says hi, nods, and nothing else as he passes us on his way into the kitchen. He looks guarded. I feel absolutely crestfallen.

As the party goes on, he keeps his distance. Tanya shows up before long, and next thing you know she's sitting on the other side of the living room with him and Rosalie. Her back is towards me, and she's all over him, sitting kitty corner and chatting vivaciously, occasionally touching his knee. Rosalie is perched on the arm of his chair, and he's leaning back with his head tilted towards her.

Meanwhile, Emmett's friend Emily is asking about the bandage and I have to explain what happened. I give an abbreviated version, mentioning only that Edward was there and lent me his sweat towel. When I say his name he turns his head partway towards me but does not make eye contact. I feel awkward saying his name when he's right across the room ignoring me; I don't want him to think I'm _talking_ about him.

Emmett joins in and is making some joking remark about how I owe Edward a new sweat towel since I went and bled all over his.

I glance over at him again. He's not looking at me but his head is tilted towards me. Well, that's natural, we're speaking his name, of course he's going to prick up his ears. It would be so easy for him to join in the conversation if he wanted to, but it's apparent he doesn't.

Now Emmett is launching into the story of how I got the cast in the first place and I'm telling him to please shut up, which serves only to attract more attention from his friends nearby.

"Yeah, so Bella's at home at our house in Port Angeles hanging out with some friends and the friends are going on a 7-Eleven run to get some ice cream and Bella's changed her mind about what ice cream flavor she wants and she's leaning out of her upstairs bedroom window calling to them when she fucking falls out of the window."

People are aghast. "She fell out of a second-story window?"

"That's right."

Everyone looks at me, I can feel my cheeks going beet red, and then—I guess when everyone realizes I'm basically unharmed—the chorus of laughter erupts at my expense. _Oh well._

"Some camellia bushes broke my fall," I explain, solemnly. People are practically rolling on the floor laughing. "Eventually I landed in the flower bed, but I landed kind of awkwardly on this wrist…"—holding it up—"and there you have it."

Emmett adds, "Bella here is what you'd technically call a schlimazel."

Like I haven't heard that one before. I give my stock answer. "Yeah, well, at least I'm not a schlemiel, _Emmett._"

The laughter dies down and I catch Tanya's voice saying sharply, almost shrewishly, "Edward! Did you hear a word I just said?"

I see Edward stand up, bend down and whisper something in Tanya's ear, and walk out the French doors that give out onto a small patio.

Tanya says something quietly to Rosalie and then stands up and follows Edward outside. She looks pissed.

The rest of the party drags on. Tanya regains her composure, but I'm faintly encouraged to see she's no longer monopolizing him; he's making the rounds. However, he never comes to speak to me. Meanwhile, I've never been so physically aware of someone in my life. I'm drifting through conversations while attempting to pick out his voice across the room. He catches me looking at him once, and he looks away quickly, so I renew my efforts not to look at him again, but it's impossible. Every detail about him—those piercing light-colored eyes framed by heavy brows, his ravishingly red lips always ready to be drawn up into a smirk, his long, lean, graceful frame, his long, white, elegant hands—every detail registers in my mind and pleases me. My ear catches his laugh. My brain charts his movements. And I am desperately trying to glean some solace from the fact that he is talking to _every_one but me. He's avoiding me like the plague. Surely that is not the same thing as being indifferent?

The party slowly winds down, but people seem to be lingering, hanging out on the pleasantly warm patio into the evening. At the earliest possible moment I can do so without its seeming odd, I go to my room. Standing in from of the mirror, I strip off my prettiest—well, only—sundress, which I had of course put on thinking about him. Blue-gray with white flowers and white ric-rac trim, with wide straps and a fitted empire bodice and swishy skirt, it is much more feminine than most of my clothes and usually makes me feel pretty—but not now. I let it drop to the floor, where I trample it with my bare feet and leave it crumpled. I stand contemplating myself in the mirror, dressed in my pink cotton bra and boy shorts.

"Of course he's not interested in you. Why should he be? You're a kid." From my knobbly knees to my narrow hips to my nearly nonexistent rack—I _have _to wear my hair long, so as not to be mistaken for a boy, I sometimes feel.

I crawl into bed, upset. Far more upset than I should be over this guy I have seen all of three times. Sleep is a long time coming, delayed by my miserable self-torture of remembering every enchanting detail of the last two times I've seen him.

That was the first night I dreamt of Edward Cullen.


	4. Chapter 4

Early morning I wake up with a start, propping myself up on both elbows and panting. _Jesus Christ. _What the hell was I just dreaming? I let myself sink back into the pillows and squeeze my thighs together, savoring the aftershocks. _Jesus Christ. _I just _came _in my _sleep._ I don't even think I was _touching _myself. I close my eyes, wishing myself with all my might back in that dream state. I replay it in my mind, trying to recall every delicious detail.

_I am lying in my old bed at home in Port Angeles when, not unlike a few moments ago, I awaken suddenly. Propping myself up on my elbows, I am surprised but somehow not startled to see Edward standing at the foot of my bed. Moonlight is streaming in through the window and I can see him quite clearly, dressed all in black, his face and arms pale, his hair wild. His penetrating gaze pins me to the spot; I cannot move, nor do I want to. A delightful ache radiates from the very center of me, spreading up into my belly and spreading my thighs. Every nerve is alive, alert, activated by my vulnerable posture: supine, open, receptive. I want_ _to feel his arms around me, his weight on me, his mouth on mine. I want to feel him inside me._

_I smile, then bite my lip to stop myself, feeling too forward. Never breaking his gaze, he returns the smile, and as his lip curls I see his eyeteeth—long and white. Even in my dream state I have a moment of lucid thought during which I groan, oh good lord, I'm having a vampire dream?; but a moment later, my senses are voluptuously overwhelmed. He's moving towards me, fluidly pulling the covers back and, oh, he's moving his hands up my thighs, he's pushing up my nightgown, the silk and his long clever fingers caressing me together. Naked underneath my gown, I open my legs more, bending my knees, shameless, aching for him. I whisper his name. He's still moving towards me, over me, closing in. He slides his fingertips up my arm and pushes the dainty strap from my shoulder; I arch my back as his lips meet my nipple in a gentle kiss, then electric sparks cascade down my spine as he licks my breast, his sharp teeth so close to the tender flesh. He pushes down the other strap, exposing my breasts completely, and rains kisses on my other nipple, the underside of my breast, between my breasts, moving down to my navel. I'm panting, I'm writhing, I'm begging him now to satisfy this aching need he has created in me. As he moves up, angling his mouth towards my neck, I brace myself for the stabbing pain of his teeth but instead feel the purest, most exquisite pleasure as he penetrates me._

And here is where I jolt awake. I am not even sure whether he was _fucking _me or just _biting _me—or both at once—but I want to drift back to sleep and feel that utter vulnerability and overwhelming pleasure again. _Now I understand, _I keep thinking. _Now I get it. _

I roll onto my stomach and groan. I can't get back to sleep now. I feel positively swollen; I am still so highly aroused that I might have to hump my pillow just to get myself into a calm enough state to get out of bed. I push the corner of a pillow between my legs and rub against it, but it's no good, I am far beyond that gentle warm-up. So I slip my hand between my legs, first over my panties, but now under—usually I am not so direct with myself. Curious, I slip my middle finger down further to feel myself—what would it feel like for _him? _I am so slick and cushiony down there I'm surprised, almost embarrassed, and my finger slides inside easily—but though the tentative touch _there _of my own slender finger promises some small relief, it's a feeble substitute for what my body is craving, so I move my hand back up, spreading my own slippery wetness as I circle and press the spot that will make me feel good. In a few moments I am thrusting my hips against the heel of my palm and then I am overwhelmed by pangs of pleasure radiating outward to my fingers and curling my toes, I am shoving my face into the pillow to muffle the small mewling sounds coming out of my throat. _God. _I roll back onto my back and lie there, staring at the ceiling, satisfied yet _so _unsatisfied, limbs heavy, gathering the will to get up and take a shower and calm the fuck down.

Finally, twenty minutes later, as I stand under the showerhead in a daze, letting lukewarm water pour over my head and cool my fevered brain, I contemplate my dream.

I'm not completely innocent, but I've never felt _anything_ like this before. When I went all the way with Jacob, last winter, I was driven more by curiosity than _lust. _He was my good buddy going way back, and I often caught him looking at me in an admiring way that flattered my vanity, so when one night early in our junior year a study session at his house turned into some tentative kissing I thought, he's a nice guy, he's a good guy, he's cute, he'd be as good as anyone to try it out with. So I let the kissing evolve into makeout sessions on the green woolen Black family couch and the backseat of his black VW, and around Christmastime I let him roll on a condom and relieve me of my virginity (and his too, in one fell swoop). Throughout our affair, or whatever, I maintained a kind of detached interest in the proceedings. I liked him, and I liked feeling the evidence of his desire for me pressing against my thigh and his eagerness to please me, but the pleasing always seemed a little complicated. I showed him how to touch me down there, and he would always kiss me however and wherever I suggested, but I always felt like it was a job of work to get me off. I could count on two hands the number of times we did it before I felt compelled to tell him, a couple days after Valentine's, I wanted to just go back to being friends. He took it manfully, then moped around for a couple of months, so I was sort of relieved and glad when I heard about him and some girl going off together into the woods during the first beach bonfire of the year, in early May. Of course we were never friends again in the same way, though we stayed friendly.

Now, as my soapy good hand glides over my body, I find myself _wondering _about Edward. What would it be _like _to be with him? He's older, he's been with girls. How many girls? I feel a twist of jealousy, but also a jolt of excitement. He probably knows what he's doing in a way my 16-year-old virgin boyfriend couldn't possibly. He's a grown man. Clever fingers. Intense eyes. Red lips, white teeth. "He's scary smart," says Emmett. "He's an emotional vampire."—probably the seed of my dream. His seed. His cock. I want to see it. How big is it? What does it look like? How does it feel? Tanya knows. _God, Bella, stop being such a pervert._

I take the plastic bag off my cast, wrap one towel around my head and another around my torso, go back into my room, and collapse on the bed, staring at the ceiling again.

Of three things I am absolutely certain:

Vampires are freaking hot.

I desperately want Edward Cullen to make love to me.

I need to _rein it in._


	5. Chapter 5

A couple of days later, Monday evening, I am sitting in the left field bleachers at Safeco field with Em and Jasper. Emmett had burst home in the late afternoon, announcing, "All right, Bella, your dreams have come true and we've all got tickets to tonight's game. We're playing the Cubs. Not sure who sucks worse."

"Excellent," I'd crowed, racing upstairs to put my hair in a ponytail and dig out my Mariners cap, and then go online to print out a fresh scorecard.

The Cubs are leading 2–1 after 4 innings when Jasper and Emmett are greeting someone and I look over to see Edward scooching into the row behind us. He sits down behind Emmett.

I've had thirty-six hours to calm down since that x-rated dream, but as soon as I see him my pulse is flying and my cheeks are burning. At first I can barely look at him, but that's fine because he's not looking at me. He is getting an update on the game from Emmett, who gives him the basic rundown, then says,

"For further detail I refer you to Bella," pointing at me with his thumb. I glance over my shoulder and find that he _is _looking at me now. I smile and quickly look back at the game, embarrassed. "She's keeping score," Emmett continues.

"Really?" he sounds amused. He slides over so he's sitting behind me. "Let's see," he says, crooking his finger, his head close to mine. His velvety voice in my ear sends chills down my backbone and reminds me of that first night. His voice is lower than Emmett's, I notice.

I hand him my scorecard and he looks it over. I look back at him again and it finally registers that he's wearing a Cubs cap.

"What is that thing on your head?" I ask, disdainfully.

He does not look up from the scorecard but he grins. God, he is beautiful.

"What are these symbols you're using?"

"They're my dad's."

"She's her father's daughter all right," laughs Emmett. Edward hands the sheet back to me and slides back over towards Emmett. Dammit. He really does seem to want to be as far away from me as possible. What's wrong with me, anyway? I pull my woolen turtleneck over my nose to check for B.O. but the results come up negative. Unless maybe you can't smell your own B.O.

We watch the game for a few minutes, and then I hear Edward asking Emmett about Dad. What does he do.

"Constable on patrol."

"He's a cop?"

"Police chief."

"Really?"

"Yup. Chief McCarty."

"_Chief _McCarty. Of Port Angeles? Nice, quiet gig."

"Well, not that quiet. There's a rough element in Port Angeles."

I jump in. "Plus remember we had that serial killer. Although he was an out-of-towner."

'That's right," Emmett agrees. "That was quite a feather in Dad's cap."

"Bit of a cliché, though, isn't it?" Edward drawls. "The good Irish cop."

"That's what you want, though, right? An expert in the field. Like your Jewish psychotherapist, your gay hairdresser, your Romanian mathematician…"

Edward cracks up at this. "That's right."

"Hey guys," sings a girl's voice. I look up to see it's Rosalie. And Tanya. _Crap._ I glance at Edward. He's looking at me, so I drop my eyes.

Tanya tells Edward to shove over, so he does and now he's sitting directly behind me with the two girls next to him. I quickly discover that if I shift either way I brush up against one of his knees, which is incredibly awkward, so I center myself and I hunch over my scorecard and try not to listen to what Tanya's saying because I'm sure it will depress me. She's chattering away about people I don't know and the classes she's teaching in the fall and a variety of other topics. She's trying to draw him out, but is getting only monosyllabic responses or, in a couple of cases, none at all. I'm starting to actually feel bad for her, when I hear him murmur something I don't quite catch, and she exclaims,

"You can't leave _now. _We just _got _here."

He brushes this off. "Not much more to see here, I think. This pitcher stinks. Mariners are turning it around. Ask the statistician." He yanks on my ponytail.

I turn around to my left, away from Tanya, and flash him a questioning look. _What was he _doing? _Did she see that? _He sucks in his cheeks slightly, mockingly. I turn back around.

Tanya is asking in a low voice, "I was wondering if you wanted to come over later." _Fuck._

There's a pause. "I don't think that's a good idea." Another pause. "I have work to do."

"Talk later?"

He sounds distracted. "Yeah, sure." He stands up. "OK guys, I'm off." As he's making his way sideways along the row away from us, I catch his eye and he gives me a little smile that seems almost embarrassed.

When the game ends, Jasper snags my scorecard and looks it over. "Hm, what happened here, Bella? You really fell down on the job." I look down at the card, which is halfway filled out and covered with doodles. I crumple it up.

. . . . . .

After that there's a long gap before I see him again—a good couple of weeks. We're coming up on Labor Day; school starts the week after, and my birthday falls on the holiday weekend. I'm considering going home, and this plan firms up when Emmett mentions to me that he's going camping that weekend. With Edward. Em doesn't mention my birthday, and I'm not going to stoop to reminding him.

On Friday morning I'm sitting on the living room couch, rereading _Tess of the d'Urbervilles._ I'm not taking any English this semester, as I've already fulfilled the high school requirements for it, and aside from fulfilling requirements—which at this point are down to electives—my schedule is going to be filled with things like analytic geometry and freshman biology. I probably won't have much time for reading novels, so I am enjoying it now, while I can.

There's a quick knock at the door, then the knob turns and Edward walks in, nearly giving me a heart attack. He's wearing jeans and hiking boots and looking like cute outdoorsy guy who just stepped out of a North Face ad. He smirks when he sees me sitting there alone. He walks directly over to the couch and drops down next to me.

"_Miss _McCarty."

I stare at him in bewilderment—it's as if our last two meetings hadn't happened they way they had, and he is picking up directly from our meeting at the track. His hesitancy and standoffishness have vanished, and he is radiating good humor and flirty familiarity. He takes the book out of my hands and looks at the title.

His eyebrow darts up but he says nothing. He gives it a remarkably thorough inspection, looking not only at the back cover and flap copy but turning to the first page and reading the first paragraph.

While I'm curled up on the couch with my legs tucked under me, he's sprawled out with his legs wide apart, his knee lightly touching mine, his shoulder touching my shoulder. The hair on his arms is heavy and dark blond. I find myself wondering what color the _rest _of his hair is. Like the hair on his chest, if any. And the hair traveling down his belly. And…

He hands the book back to me. I tear my eyes away from his thighs. "A fan of the classics?" he asks.

"I guess so. You?"

"I mostly read nonfiction." He grins, showing me those sharp eyeteeth of his.

He clears his throat. "I've been meaning to ask you something."

My heart stutters. "What is it?" I stammer. Ugh, I can feel my cheeks going more pink than they already are.

He leans his head in a little closer, looking up at me through his eyelashes, and whispers. "What flavor were you after?"

"What?" I am too discombobulated by how close he is to me to have the pleasure of understanding him.

"The ice cream. That made you fall out of the window."

Bastard. I close my eyes and shake my head, smiling. Then I peek at him and whisper back, "Strawberry."

Suddenly he's up off the couch, moving fluidly to perch on the armrest a couple of feet away from me. I hear Emmett's footsteps coming down the hall.

"Hey man, I didn't hear you come in," Emmett says to Edward.

"Yeah. You ready?"

"Yeah, let me grab my stuff."

"I'll help you."

There's a flurry of activity and they're out the door. "OK, Bella, have fun this weekend. I'm making Edward drive so that you can have the Crapmobile. Make sure you check the fluid levels before you head down."

"Where are you going?" Edward asks me.

Emmett answers for me. "Home to Port Angeles." Still no recollection of the birthday, it appears. I would have thought the trip home would jog his memory.

"Have fun," says Edward, smiling. I wave them off from the front door, then go back inside and fling myself down on the couch.

I feel elated. After these last three weeks of longing that felt hopeless, that kept me tossing in my bed at night and picking at my food, I am basking in the sunshine of this brief attention from him. Who knows, though. Next time I see him we may well be back to the other mode, with him keeping his distance and me wishing to be back in his good graces.

**_Reviews make me write faster. No lie._**


	6. Chapter 6

After they leave I decide I'd better call home and let them know I am coming—I have sort of decided it all and worked out getting the car from Emmett but not actually mentioned it to my folks. Mom answers the phone, sounding kind of flustered.

"Come home? This weekend? Well, that's fine, sweetheart, but we're not going to be here, you remember."

"What?"

"Didn't I tell you? I'm sure I did. We're taking the twins to Disneyland. They still haven't been."

"This weekend you're taking them?"

"Yes, yes," she says, a little impatiently. "Before school starts again. Hang on…" She must be covering the phone with her hand now because I can hear her muffledly yelling to (or at) someone in the background.

I sink down on the front step, removing my phone from my ear to stare at it. _I can't believe this. They fucking forgot my birthday._

"Bella? Are you there? Look, honey, we're trying to get out the door. But definitely come home if you like, I'm sure your friends would love to see you. We'll leave the key under the flowerpot."

I am opening my mouth to tell her, but then imagine all the misery that will break out when I throw a wrench into the twins' long-desired trip to Disneyland. Plus, if I really think about it, the reason why my little brothers haven't been able to go sooner gives me pause. I'm not a kid anymore. I don't need to be the center of attention right now. I clear my throat.

"OK, Mom. Have fun. I'll see what I end up doing."

I hang up but remain on the step, thinking what I should do. Problem is, I don't really know anyone here in Seattle yet, outside of Emmett's circle. Staying alone here in this house for my seventeenth birthday does seem way too pitiful.

Another voice interrupts my thoughts. "OK, honey, you hang in there. I'm so sorry about it. He's being a dick. You're better off." I glance up to see Rosalie walking up the front walk, phone to ear, eyes on me.

"OK. Later." She hangs up the phone, sighs, and comes and sits down next to me.

"What's up, Bella?" she asks. "You look a little forlorn."

My usual reaction would be to say, _oh, it's nothing,_ but the notion of telling _someone_ some small portion of my troubles seemed like a great relief. I've been holding a lot in lately with no girlfriend to confide in.

"Um…OK, my entire family has forgotten it's my birthday in two days and they've all left town."

Her mouth drops open and she stares at me in horror. I have to laugh at the look on her face and, really, the preposterousness of the situation. I begin giggling and find I cannot stop. She looks at me as if I'm mad.

"At least you can laugh about it," she says, pursing her lips. "If I were you I would be _so_ upset. That is outrageous. I'm going to give Emmett a piece of my mind." She whips her cellphone back out.

I touch her hand to stop her. "No, no, don't do that. I don't want to ruin his camping trip. I'm a little bummed, but I'll be all right. It's more that I have to figure out what to do with myself."

"Well, maybe we girls should have a night out on the town! Between you and Tanya, it's quite a mess around here. We need some distraction."

I freeze at the mention of Tanya's name. Is that who she was just talking to on the phone?

"What's up with Tanya?" I ask, striving to sound casual.

"Ohhh…" she grimaces, clearly recalling the need to be discreet. "Guy trouble."

"Oh." My mind starts racing. _What?_ _What? _"What happened?"

"She's just having some problems with a guy she's been seeing."

I don't think she's going to just spill about her best friend's business. _I need to get this out of her. Let her know I know._

"With Edward?" I ask. My stomach is in knots.

She gives me a sharp look. "How did you know about that?"

"Um…well, Emmett told me a little about their…arrangement." _I need to not get Emmett in trouble over this._ "I guess I noticed some little thing between them and was asking him about it." _There, maybe that absolves him of telling me?_

"Don't worry, I would never say anything," I add. "To anyone."

"Well, I don't think there'd be much to tell. It seems like they're done."

I feel like I can't quite breathe.

"Hopefully they're done," she revises.

_Keep her talking. Confide something personal. _I nod. "I…uh…I had to break up with someone earlier this year. It sucked."

She sighs. "It's easier to be the one doing the breaking up. In this case it's him…but that's probably a good sign."

"Why?"

"Because in the past it was always her breaking it off, then starting it up again. She kept getting sucked back into it."

"But this time it's him?" I keep my eyes on the ground. My thoughts are flying.

"Yeah." She blew her breath out.

"You think he's being a dick? I heard you say." I glance at her.

"Well." She tilts her head to one side. "It's just been a bad situation. I think he's been totally honest with her, he just won't, or can't, give her what she wants. I think she was fine at first with it being just physical,"—she glances hesitantly at me—"but after a time she started having feelings for him, and he's always kept her at arm's length. The situation drained her."

I nod but keep silent.

"She would call it off, hoping that he would miss her and come around to her point of view, but he never did. I think he's like that with girls. I mean, look at him, it's not hard for him to get laid so maybe he figures why bother with all the other stuff. Or maybe he just doesn't want the entanglement…he's pretty driven by his work."

"What's his area of focus? I mean, I know he's a math guy." Thanks to Google, I also know he's an assistant professor, but that's about all. I had been dying to ask someone questions about him but was too nervous about betraying my interest to ask Emmett.

"He's working on this famous unsolved equation, or set of equations, I forget the name. You'd have to ask him. Something to do with air turbulence and motion of fluids. That's the other thing about him, he's a math genius, like a real genius. He'll go through these periods of intense work where we don't see him for weeks. That's part of the thing with Tanya too, I bet. He lives in his head, he's not like the rest of us."

She adds, "I think his father laid some heavy shit on him growing up."

"Like how?"

"OK, so, his dad was Russian, I think, also a mathematician, and during the eighties he fled to Europe, and then defected here. He brought Edward with him. And the set of equations Edward's working on, that was his dad's work."

"_He brought Edward with him." That explains it—his distinctive way of speaking. He sounds American, but English is not his first language. _"His dad is dead?" I ask.

"Yes."

"So he's carrying on his legacy?"

"Exactly. You know, it's funny," she muses, "he's so loyal when he wants to be. He's gotten offers, from MIT, Harvard, but he stays here. U-Dub sponsored his dad, helped him defect, and I think Boeing created a scholarship program basically tailor-made to help him."

She stands up, rubbing her hands on her jeans. "Anyway," she says, "shall we have a girls' night out, then?"

_No freaking way. Not only was I unable to bear the idea of a quasi tête-à-tête with a dismal Tanya, my head was spinning with the desperate need to chew over all the information I had just gleaned. It was over between them. Edward's lighthearted mood, his behavior towards me this morning. I had to get away and _think. "Well, actually, I had pretty much decided to head home for the weekend. Um, my parents are away but I can still see some old friends. I've already mentioned it to a couple of people."

"Oh, fun, they should throw you a party."

"Yeah, maybe they will."

"OK, I'll take a raincheck on the night out on the town. Speaking of rain, do you mind if I come in, I left my raincoat here ages ago and they're saying there's a chance it'll storm this weekend."

"No, of course." I went inside, held the door open for her, and then went into my room to call Jessica Stanley.


	7. Chapter 7

_**Author's note: I changed the book Bella is reading in chapter 5 to **_**Tess of the d'Urbervilles.**

"_What flavor were you after?"_

"_Strawberry."_

"_Did you get a taste?"_

_I shake my head slightly, staring into his eyes. I feel intoxicated._

"_I want to taste you."_

_He moves closer, his lips so close to mine now, but still not touching, until I am trembling with anticipation. Now suddenly his mouth is on mine, encompassing mine, warm and urgent. My lips open oh so willingly to his kiss and when our tongues entwine it sends an electric current of pure, stark desire through me._

_We're on the living room couch, just like this morning, except that I'm wearing my blue sundress and we're alone. Emmett has gone camping. Dream Edward's hand moves slowly down my waist and across my hip and pulls me onto his lap, straddling him. He leans his head back on the sofa cushions and I tilt my head down to kiss him, more and more deeply, as his hands steal up my skirt, caressing my thighs, my hips, my ass. I'm naked under my dress, completely vulnerable to him. He pulls me flush against his hips and grinds against me so I feel his rigid length and my stomach twists with a twinge of delicious fear, the kind you experience the first time you feel a guy's hardness pressing against you and realize it's for you, that you've done that to him, that he wants you in that way. _

_Now I'm eagerly exploring his mouth with mine and raking my fingers through his silken hair as he pushes my hips back and unbuttons his jeans, but when I run my tongue along his teeth I discover they are razor-sharp. I taste the salty, rusty tang of blood and when my eyes flash open I find he's looking at me with hypnotic intensity. "There," he murmurs, and as he sucks my tongue, I feel him slide into me, so long and strong that I feel faint with pleasure. I rock my hips against him, trying to bring him ever deeper, and drop my head back as his lips move down my throat. Rosalie's words about Tanya echo in my head and I whisper,_

"_A__re you going to drain me too?"_

"_No," he growls, licking my throat just below my ear as he sits up and leans forward, wrapping both arms around me and supporting me as his thrusts quicken. "I'm going to fill you up…"_

_And just as I feel him pulsing inside me, just as I feel his warmth spreading and my own throbbing climax overtaking me, just then the phone next to my bed begins chirping insistently._

"Not now!" I groan, trying to punch "ignore" and knocking the phone and my book off the bedside table. I have one eye half-open and the dim gray light coming through the window is assaulting my vision. I am in my old bedroom at home, alone in the house. Groaning, I pull the quilt over my head and try to recapture the elusive dream but it's gone.

I still feel the lingering pulses of pleasure and I slide my hand between my legs to capitalize on them. As I re-tread the dream I find myself fixating on the idea of Edward finding his release inside me, unfettered. God, I am so turned on by it. What an irresponsible little dream-slut I am turning into.

When it finally subsides, I throw the quilt off and sit up. I shake my head and smile, thinking, _again_. What guy could make me _come _in my _sleep _like this.

He's an incubus.


	8. Chapter 8

"Stanley."

"Newton."

"Truth or dare?"

Her pink lips curl into a sly smile. "Dare," she answers, in a tone that implies she is the one challenging him.

"Go jump in the lake."

"What!"

He smiles smugly. "Take off all your clothes and go for a swim."

Jessica looks at him, clearly intrigued and flattered, then glances around the circle. "Not by myself," she stipulates.

Tyler laughs. "The more the merrier," he agrees. "Take a couple of them with you." He nods towards us girls. Then takes a swig of his beer.

She glances around again. "Angela and Bella." She looks at us pleadingly.

I roll my eyes. She is so transparent: we are the two flattest-chested girls of the group. She clearly wants to show off her charms to best advantage.

I hold up my cast. "Sorry, no swimming, doctor's orders."

Angela leans over to me. "Shouldn't you have that thing off by now?"

"Yeah, it was supposed to come off last week, I thought I'd wait till I was home and go see Dr. Facinelli about it."

"Why don't you take it off yourself?" Mike suggests.

"What? That's crazy."

"People do it all the time. It's not that hard. My brother took a long arm cast off with his Dremel."

"What's a Dremel?"

"It's a sort of rotary saw."

"No freaking way," I reply.

"No, no, I'm not saying you need one of those. For this little thing, I bet you can use poultry shears."

"Really?" I hold the cast up in front of my face and inspect it. Normally I would not be entertaining this idea for even a minute, but I am so beyond sick of this cast…and perhaps my judgment is clouded by the couple—OK, a couple three—blended margaritas I have drunk, my own personal best for consumption of hard alcohol in one evening.

"Sure. They can cut through chicken bones, right? So they can cut through plaster."

"I dunno," I say, doubtfully, fingering the little raised scar on the bottom side of my chin.

"I dare you," he offers.

"It's not my turn."

"Come on, Bella." He sniffs at the cast. "This thing stinks. Don't you want it off? Then you can go for a swim."

Actually, that sounds delightful. I haven't gone for a swim all summer and I won't have many chances left. "Um. OK."

Mike jumps up and runs to the kitchen, and after a moment of rummaging around returns with the shears and makes short work of cutting the cast off my wrist.

"Does it hurt?" Jessica asks, as I massage and rotate my wrist. It is paler than usual, almost gray.

"No, it feels fine." Just looks hideous.

"OK, then, let's go." She jumps up. "We get a head start," she informs Mike.

"Wait," I object. "I'm getting my bathing suit."

"Oh my god, Bella, don't be ridiculous. Live a little."

"Come on, Bella," urges Angela, smiling. Why is _she _all in a lather to get naked? Ben isn't even here.

I roll my eyes again and follow them out the back door. Jessica begins sprinting down to the dock, stripping off her top as she runs.

"Hurry up, Bella! Get in the water before they come!"

Both of them are stripped bare and jumping into the water in no time flat. I am still hopping on the edge of the dock, peeling off my jeans and peering at the water.

"Is it cold?"

"Yes! Get in here!" They are splashing each other and laughing like maniacs.

Taking a quick look behind me, I slip off my camisole and panties and leap into the water. It is shockingly cold at first, which makes me start laughing like a maniac too, but after I am immersed in it for a couple of minutes I gradually began to feel warm. It is a nice night for Port Angeles in early September—high sixties, clear, with a big gibbous moon.

I swim out towards the middle of the lake, while they stay pretty close to the edge, chasing and shoving each other. It is actually lovely—I have swum in this lake my whole life, but never without a swimsuit, and it feels beautiful to glide through the water with no barrier, like a silvery fish or a graceful swan. I dive under, and when I surface hear Tyler's teasing voice, calling, "Oh ladies…"

I tread water and peer back at the shore. He is holding up a pair of jeans and what looks like Jessica's top. Mike is on the dock, picking up my clothes.

"Don't you dare," Jessica is screeching, before I quite realize what is happening. They laugh in response, and take off back up the path to the house. With all of our clothes.

Angela turns to me and opens her mouth. Then starts cracking up. I swim back over towards them. They are standing waist-deep in the shallower water and cackling hysterically.

"Oh my god, you guys, now what?" I demand.

"Wait, wait, I know," Jessica says, holding up one finger. She cups her hands around her mouth and bellows. "Lauren!"

We all wait and after a minute she yells again, more shrilly this time. "Lauren!" No response.

"Great," I comment.

"'S OK, 's OK," she replies, slurring her words slightly. "We'll just sneak in through the garage and get up to your room."

"Hang on, I think there are some clothes in the garage. In bags, for Goodwill. You can get in there, the code is 3-5-7-9."

"OK, let's go."

"No, you go," I tell her. I am not about to run up the path buck naked. For all I know Mike and Tyler are waiting at the top to surprise us. "This is all your fault. And, don't forget, it's my birthday. _You _bring _me _something to wear."

She smiles sheepishly at me. "OK, Bella. Sorry." She and Angela look at each other, nod, then wade out of the water and bolt up the path towards the front of the house and the garage.

I am shivering now that so much of my skin is exposed to the night air, so I turn back towards the middle of the lake and am about to dive back under when I hear a sudden squealing. I look back, expecting to see Mike or Tyler leaping out to block their path and send them scurrying back to the lake, but I am wrong. Someone _is _coming down the path, but he is much larger and bulkier than Mike or Tyler. _Oh my god, it's Emmett. Followed by Edward. Oh my god, no._ Edward is looking over his shoulder at the two naked girls streaking past, while Emmett is glaring right at me.

I immediately drop into the water, letting it cover me up to my neck, and turn back to face the shore, backing up so I am not in the shallowest shallows. I feel absolutely panicked. Two spiky-haired pimply-faced boys absconding with my clothing is bad, but this is exponentially worse. This is the worst-case scenario.

Emmett is at the water's edge, hands splayed out, furious. "Goddammit, Bella, I leave you alone for two days and all hell has broken loose."

"Hey, Emmett."

"Don't you 'hey Emmett' me, young lady." Lord, he sounds exactly like Dad. "What is going on here?"

"Nothing." I am having trouble thinking clearly. Edward is standing on the shore a little behind Emmett, fully grinning at me. _Bastard._

"Get out of the water, Bella," Emmett says, tiredly.

"I can't."

"What do you mean, you can't."

I pause. Isn't it obvious? OK, Emmett, allow me to spell it out for you. "I don't have anything on."

"Mother of God, Bella…" Emmett is going on talking, but I am unable to follow what he is saying because now Edward is unbuttoning his flannel shirt. _What the heck is he doing? Is he coming in here after me? _I am about to start dog-paddling back to the middle of the lake when he pulls the shirt off over his head, holds it out towards me, and turns to face the other direction. He nudges Emmett and Emmett huffs and turns around as well.

I hesitate, realizing that I have to get out of the water and take the shirt from him, and I had better hurry up if I want to do it before one of them turns back around. I come out of the water and walk cautiously towards them.

"Don't look," I say, taking the shirt from Edward and quickly slipping it over my head. As I button up the top couple of buttons my eyes roam over him, taking in his broad shoulders, narrow waist, his smooth, muscled back. He looks like he's carved of marble. His pale skin glowing like mine in the moonlight. I feel a tingling down low in my belly and I know I'm getting wet between my legs. I've never been excited like this at the mere sight of a man. I drop my eyes.

"All right," I mutter.

Emmett looks back at me, then starts up the hill. I glance at Edward, and follow Emmett. Edward brings up the rear. His shirt is large enough on me that my ass is thankfully completely covered, but I am hyperaware of the fact that I am walking in front of him naked but for his shirt and that that my legs are bare up to the tops of my thighs. I wonder if he's looking me over like I was just looking him over. I steal a glance back at him. He smirks at me and leans in.

"Looks good on you," he whispers. I flush with pleasure and quickly turn my head back to look at Emmett. He's marching a few feet ahead, leading us towards the front of the house, and does not appear to have heard. I'm so excited I can barely walk straight.

I look back at him again. "What are you guys _doing _here?"

"It was really cold out there by the coast. I don't think my sleeping bag had the correct temperature rating. Plus, a bear got into our food."

I give a surprised laugh. "Really?"

Emmett hears _that,_ and turns to glare at me. "Yeah, and this wuss is whining all morning about the lack of beef jerky and the lack of feeling in his feet until finally I cave to his demands to stop by the McCarty home en route back, for a meal and a hot shower, and what do I find but Mike _Newton_ with a beer in one hand and twirling a pair of my sister's panties around the other."

His mention of Edward's asking to stop here catches my attention for a moment, before the mention of my panties sends me into a tailspin. _Deny._ "How do you know they were mine?" I ask, haughtily.

"He was making a public service announcement about it."

As we round the corner of the garage, Jessica comes barreling around from the other direction and nearly crashes into Emmett. She's dressed, sort of, and has an armful of clothing, which she presses into my hands.

"Sorry, Bella," she whispers, then gets an eyeful of shirtless Edward and me wearing his shirt and looks at me inquiringly, like a cat who has just spotted another cat holding a canary.

"Party's over, girls," Emmett proclaims. Angela has appeared a few steps behind Jessica.

"Sorry, Emmett. Bye, Bella." "Bye Bella." They head off together down the sidewalk, heads close together and casting an excessive number of glances back at us, or, I presume, Edward.

Emmett is holding open the front door and looking at me expectantly. The house is empty—it appears that he's already dismissed the rest of my friends, perhaps after the panty PSA and before heading down to the lake, and he is waiting to get me inside before he finishes bawling me out. As I come in, he follows and asks in a more quiet tone, dripping with sarcasm,

"So why did Mike Newton have your panties, Bella? You didn't spread your legs for him, too, did you?"

My jaw drops. I cannot believe he is saying this to me in front of Edward, or anyone. I am livid, and also speechless.

Edward is closing the door behind Emmett, and says calmly, "Hey, man. That's unnecessary."

_So that's what is pissing him off to this degree?_ Emmett had found out about me and Jacob, when he had gone into the outer pocket of my backpack after a pen and found a condom wrapper, and although he had not ratted me out to our parents, he had given me a long, humiliating, and surreal talking-to about protecting my virtue, explaining that the McCarty women were accustomed to receiving at least an offer of marriage before giving it up. Emmett had a conservative streak a mile wide, mainly when it came to me.

I turn on my brother. "Emmett, you're an idiot. They stole our clothes off the dock while we were swimming."

"Swimming naked. A bunch of drunk girls swimming naked." He walks over and picks up a nearly empty bottle of tequila from the dining room table, which is strewn with limes, plastic cups, salt-filled plastic sombreros, and other evidence of the margarita-making.

"What were you thinking, Bella? Dad is the _chief _of _police. _How is it OK for you to throw a party like this in his house? With a bunch of seventeen-year-old girls running around outside the house in the buff?" I notice Edward's eyebrows shoot up when Emmett says this. I also notice that his chest is sprinkled with reddish blond hair that goes darker as it trails down his belly. I tear my eyes back to Emmett.

"Well, Emmett, do you know what makes it OK? I was throwing myself a little birthday party, that's what. Since you, and everyone else in my family"—I gesture angrily around the empty house—"apparently forgot to."

His face drops. "Oh, shit, Bella, oh shit, I'm so sorry."

I have the upper hand now. "You are an ass, Emmett. And now… I'm going to take a shower," I gather up the shreds of my dignity and stalk out of the room, pulling down on Edward's shirttails to cover my backside as I climb the stairs.


	9. Chapter 9

For twenty-five minutes I sit in a hot shower, letting the water run over my head and ruminating over the multiple ways in which this evening has gone terribly awry. When the hot water runs out, I shut off the shower, comb my hair out, and put on a long-sleeved t-shirt and pajama bottoms. Black watch plaid. Flannel. Even Emmett could not impugn my modesty now.

I come halfway downstairs, stooping down to see what the scene is down here. The lights are turned down and there is a fire in the fireplace. The dining room table has been cleared off and the living room straightened up. I come to the bottom of the stairs and call out, "Hello?"

Edward's head pops out of the kitchen doorway, then the rest of him follows, wiping his hands on a dishcloth and smiling at me in a friendly way. He's got a shirt on again, a long-sleeved gray henley. I can barely look at him.

"I just came down to say goodnight."

"Don't do that. We're going to eat soon. I told Emmett to shut his big mouth and go get you some Thai food." He adds, "He said you liked Thai food."

"Yes."

"When you went upstairs he plugged in his phone and got a text from Rosalie from two days ago. About your birthday. His phone has been out of juice since Friday."

"Oh."

"He's gonna have a lot of 'splainin' to do, if that's any consolation."

I smile at him.

"Come sit down." He gestures to the couch.

"OK."

I sit down on the couch and pull my knees up to my chest. He sits next to me. I notice his knee isn't touching me this time.

"So…_how_ old are you today, Bella?"

I look at him and sigh. I feel defeated. "Seventeen."

For a moment, he doesn't react. Then he frowns. "So that night in the bar…"

I grimace. "Sixteen."

He barks out a laugh and shakes his head. There is a minute's uncomfortable silence, which he finally breaks.

"But…you're a freshman, right? Did you graduate early, then?"

"I'm not a freshman, exactly."

"Worser and worser."

I glance at him and smile ruefully. "I, uh, I'm in this program that looks for hi— …girls my age displaying ability to excel in math and science. We get early acceptance to the University of Washington and can take college-level math and science classes while we finish up our high school requirements with a tutor."

"So they try to steer you into a major in those areas."

"Right, because so many girls don't go that route even if they could. They want to incentivize us."

"Do you feel incentivized?"

"It's a good opportunity."

I hear Emmett's keys jingling in the lock, and he bursts in with several plastic bags full of fragrant take-out. I stand up to help him but Edward tells me to sit down. They go in the kitchen and dish up the food, and bring me a plate full of green curry chicken, pad Thai, and stir-fried eggplant. I am in heaven. We all sit in the living room to eat, with Emmett now next to me on the sofa and Edward in the armchair.

"I'm really sorry about forgetting your birthday, Izzy Marie," Emmett says. "I'll make it up to you."

"Mm," I hum noncommittally.

"Sorry also for what I said about you and Mike." He digs his elbow into my ribs. "I know you have better taste than that. Jacob's a good kid."

"Quit while you're ahead, Em," I whisper.

Edward comes to the rescue. "I was just asking Bella what she's taking this quarter."

"Um, calculus with analytic geometry, biol 180, econ, and then I have tutorial."

"What subjects do you still need to fulfill?"

"Just electives. I tested out of English. So I'm taking painting and psychology over the course of the year."

"With a tutor," he prompts.

"Right."

"Who?"

"Her name was…Ms. Brandon. I haven't met her yet. Just on e-mail."

"What department?"

"Art."

"Too bad you're not teaching these days, Mr. Cullen, she could have taken your calculus class. Easy C-."

"That would be the icing on the cake."

I quickly jump in before Emmett can delve into this remark. "Did you really get a C-?"

Emmett grimaces. "Yep. Wait, why I am even friends with him?"

"I don't grade on the curve."

"Why aren't you teaching now?" I ask.

"I'm researching this year."

"Edward hates teaching. He's a misanthrope."

"I am not."

"His time is better spent unraveling the great mysteries."

"Shut up, Emmett."

Emmett leans over to me. "Did you know that Edward has a type of number named after him?"

"No, I don't."

"Cullen numbers. Or are they Cullen primes?"

"Both. Also Cullen numbers of the second kind. They're not named after me though."

"Your dad, then."

"No. Some guy in Ireland in the early 1900s."

"What are you researching?" I ask.

"That's the million-dollar question," Emmett laughs.

"I'm working on the Navier-Stokes equations, which describe the motion of fluids in space. Or, more precisely, trying to gain a theoretical understanding of the equations, whose solutions are used all the time in practical applications, but which are not actually understood."

"What kind of practical applications?"

"Design of airplanes and cars, study of blood flow, design of petroleum pipelines, predicting weather patterns…"

Emmett nods sagely. "Everybody talks about the weather, but Edward's doing something about it, you see."

This cracks Edward up. "OK, enough about that. We have dessert."

They disappear into the kitchen and return with bowls. Mine has a lit candle stuck in it.

"What is it?" I ask.

Emmett shrugs, "Well, I was going to get you a cake, but Edward said hard to find a decent cake at this hour and you'd be much happier with strawberry ice cream."

I smile into my bowl, not trusting myself to look at him.

"Make a wish," Emmett adds. I make a wish and blow out the candle.

"Wha'd you wish for?" Emmett asks.

"Can't say, then it won't come true." I can feel Edward looking at me but I won't look at him.

"Are you ready to start school next week?" Emmett asks. He really is going out of his way to be friendly with me, for Emmett.

"Yeah, absolutely," I nod vigorously.

Edward raises an eyebrow at me. "Wouldn't you rather be goofing off with your friends, kicking back for senior year? Instead of rushing headlong into pressure."

I shrug. Emmett says quietly, "I think Bella needs a change of scene. She's had a lot of pressure around here."

"What do you mean?"

I look at Emmett. He answers, "So, last year, our mom was treated for breast cancer. She's in remission now, but you can imagine how hard that was. My dad was a wreck. Bella was kind of holding everything together."

I smile at Emmett. He's never really said that to me, it's nice to have him acknowledge it. I guess he's really feeling bad about his behavior earlier. As he should be.

"Yeah," I add, looking down at my nearly empty bowl. "She got diagnosed when she was pregnant with my littlest brother. So they had to delay treatment."

"_How_ many of you are there?" Edward sounds slightly incredulous.

"Five."

Edward nods. "I'm sorry. You never told me any of that, Em."

"I don't like to talk about it."

We quietly finish our ice cream, looking at the fire, and it's not long before Emmett is yawning and stretching.

"I'm beat. Edward, I'm taking one of the twins' beds. Do you want the other?"

"Nah, I'll sleep on the couch, if that's OK."

"Fine. I'll get you some blankets."

When he is gone I tell Edward thank you for the ice cream. He smiles at me. I say goodnight and head upstairs.

I shut myself in my room and lie down on top of my covers, far too agitated to sleep. How could I sleep, knowing Edward is lying downstairs on that couch. I spend some time picturing that. After about half an hour, I hear the bathroom door open, and after a minute there is a quiet knock at my door.

It's Edward, leaning against the doorframe. My heart pounds with anticipation.

"I saw your light was still on. I just wanted to say happy birthday again before I went to bed. Sorry it was such a crappy one."

"It wasn't. You saved it."

He smiles at me and I decide, now or never. I put my hand on his arm and stretch up and kiss him on the cheek, close to the corner of his mouth.

He tilts his head down and for a moment I think he is going to kiss me back. Instead he whispers,

"So you're sure there's not some mistake?"

"About what?"

"Your age."

I smile. "Yes, I'm fairly sure," I say lightly. His cheek is very close to mine. I want to rub my cheek against his and feel those three days of whiskers again.

"I had been hoping you were, say, nineteen."

"Hoping?" I feel like he is on the verge of addressing it, this thing of ours.

"Thinking. I had been thinking you were maybe nineteen."

I don't know what to say. I feel his breath, warm on my cheek. I breathe in his scent, the same as I noticed from his shirt—he smells pretty freaking good for someone who just spent two nights in the woods, or maybe I just like the way he smells. I close my eyes, willing him to just kiss me.

Then he does. On the forehead.

"Go to bed, Bella."

And he moves away from me. I watch him go down the darkened hall, then close my door and lean back against it, slumping down to sit on the floor. I sit there for quite some time.

_**Author's Note: There really are Cullen numbers of the second kind. You can google it. Now if only there were close Cullen encounters of the third kind…sigh**_


	10. Chapter 10

I awaken the next morning around eight, eyes gritty, still exhausted from the circles my mind was tracing all night:

On the one hand, I am taken with the sweetness Edward showed me over my disastrous birthday. He took pains to try to make everything right. The strawberry ice cream—it was like a secret between us, that he was referencing in front of Emmett without Emmett's awareness, like giving me a wink Emmett couldn't see.

Or maybe he's just a flirt. Maybe he flirts with every new girl who crosses his path. Maybe I had to stop reading so much into things before I made a fool of myself.

But he had come to my room last night—what _was _that?

However, he had made it pretty clear at the same time that he thought I was a child. I knew, from my online stalking, that he was either twenty-seven or twenty-eight, assuming that he had graduated from college at the typical age. Ten years old, eleven years old when I was born…is that so different from eight or nine? What if I were nineteen, like he said. What would he have done then? Would he have stayed, would he have kissed me, really kissed me, would he have done more?

I felt fairly sure he thought I was pretty. He had a way of looking at me that gave me a pleasant sense of victory. And, of course, there was that night in the club. He _must _find me attractive, right? Right?

But I can't keep going all the way back to that night for confirmation, a lot of conflicting factors had come into play since then. And maybe it was just a passing whim, a moment of opportunity, beer goggles, who knows. Maybe it was just a slight inclination, a feeble attraction he's talking himself out of now that he knows I'm only seventeen.

And then there was Emmett and his big mouth, basically announcing to Edward that I am not a virgin. Just the recollection of it makes me cringe. Both times the subject came up, Edward had intervened and put a stop to it. Why? Was he feeling sorry for me, trying to help bring Emmett in line? Did he not like to hear about it? Did he think less of me? I am dying to know what he is _thinking._

But oh, don't forget, he has dropped Tanya. What about _that. _Was that on my account? Had he been clearing the decks for his next conquest? God, how I want to be his conquest. The thought sends shivers of longing through me.

And so my obsessive thoughts had whirled until the clock read four a.m. and I forced myself to close my eyes and think about _nothing_ until finally I drifted off.

Now I get up and pull on my jeans and a dark blue sweater, then throw a few dirty things into my laundry basket to bring downstairs with me, including Edward's flannel shirt…I had been of half a mind to just keep it, but it did smell a little swampy from the lake water so I had to give up on that idea.

As I come downstairs I hear someone just shutting off the shower. One of them is in there, and from the sounds of cups rattling, the other's in the kitchen. My heart is pounding as I come into the kitchen but it's only Emmett.

He is fiddling with the espresso maker and when he sees me he says, "Oh good, Bella, do you know how to work this thing? Can you make us all some cappuccinos?"

"Sure." I set down the laundry basket by the laundry room door and come over, taking the metal milk jug and thermometer out of his hand.

He takes a close look at my face. "Jeez, you look like crap."

I gawk at him open-mouthed in disgust. _Seriously, Emmett?_

"Sorry, sorry, that came out harsh. You just look tired."

_Great. _I turn away from him without responding and set about making cappuccinos, one at a time. One for him, one for me, and as I stand frothing the milk for the third, I hear Edward's bare feet on the hardwood floor of the other room. He comes into the kitchen and pulls out a chair at the kitchen table where Emmett is drinking his coffee, scraping it across the black-and-white checkered linoleum.

"Morning," he says. I glance at him for a split second with a slight smile but I am not sure how to act around him so I look away and keep quiet.

"Morning," Emmett answers, cheerfully. "You look like shit, too. Didn't anyone around here besides me get a good night's sleep?"

_Jesus Christ, Emmett, _why_ are you on a mission to expose_ _me?_ I walk over to the table with Edward's cappuccino, staring at the cup as if the froth is extremely interesting, and glance at him as I hand it to him. He's looking intently at me, and he does look tired, despite having washed up and shaved. His hair is towel-dried but uncombed and more messy than usual, hanging into his eyes, whish have purplish smudges underneath them. He's wearing a black t-shirt, which makes him look pale. He has pushed his chair against the wall and is leaning back, his impossibly long legs extended, ankles crossed, and his bare feet strike me as somehow startlingly naked. His fingers brush mine lightly as he takes the cup. He clears his throat and says, jovially,

"Thanks, little sister Bella."

I stop short, stop breathing, and stare at him. I'm sure the sheer overwhelming sense of horror I feel at his words is written all over my face. I quickly turn away, before Emmett can see, and go to lean against the counter as I sip my coffee for something to do with my hands. It is bitter in my mouth, I don't want it. I glance back at him again but he's looking at the floor.

"So Bella," Emmett is saying. "Are you about to start a load? Can I add a couple of things?"

I try to answer, but have to clear my throat. "Sure," I croak. Emmett gets up and leaves the room.

"I'm not your sister," I spit at Edward.

He seems only slightly taken aback. "What," he asks, flatly, his tone slightly challenging.

This incenses me. _Is he going to try to act like he doesn't know what's going on around here? _"Don't call me that."

"Lower your voice," he says quietly. I put my coffee down, march across the room, and, picking up the laundry basket, disappear into the laundry room.

He's right behind me, leaning on the doorframe. "Excuse me. I didn't think that would bother you so much." I catch that undercurrent of foreignness in his voice.

I glare at him and he looks back at me levelly.

"Yeah, well, it does," I snap at him.

He takes a step towards me and lowers his voice further. His eyes are glittering. "Well, I think you had better get used to the idea. I think it would be better if we think of each other as brother and sister."

My head is on fire. He seems so in control, and I am spinning out. _He doesn't think of me the way I think of him._ _If he did, he could not be saying these things. He's been toying with me this whole time. _

"If you actually _had _a sister, maybe you'd know how to treat girls."

That makes a flash of anger pass through his eyes.

"What, like Emmett knows how to treat you?" he growls.

God, he is beautiful. He looks agitated in a way I haven't seen him look before. Two bright spots of color are burning in his cheeks, and his eyes are shining, clear bright green with no touch of the hazel I sometimes see in them. Usually he seems so full of mockery, maintaining a sort of detached ironic distance from everything, or else—like last night, when Emmett was yelling at me—very calm, authoritative, and impossible to read. He's still hard to read, but I can feel tension rolling off him. He's also standing very close to me, here in the tiny laundry room. I notice that I'm breathing very hard and for a moment it's the only sound. Then he tilts his head down close to my ear and says quietly,

"I do have a sister. You're reminding me of her right now. She has a bit of a temper too."

This surprises me; it is the first I've heard of it in my various little information-fishing expeditions. I am trying not to let my rapidly cascading emotions show in my face, but I can feel the traitor blush spreading. He straightens up and looks at me carefully, his jaw clenched.

"She's about your age," he goes on, grimly, studying my face. "If I knew about some older guy, some guy my age, having the kind of thoughts about her, the kind of thoughts I have about you"…his clear green eyes bore into me…"I'd kill him."

I hear Emmett's footsteps approaching.

"Maybe you understand me, now_,_" he finishes, in a sharp whisper.

Emmett is at the door. "What are you guys doing in there?"

My adrenalin-charged brain has no difficulty coming up with a semi-credible reason for Edward and me being closeted together in the laundry room engaged in some sort of heated discussion.

"Edward was just giving me _instructions _on how to do the wash," I say peevishly. "Apparently he thinks I'm going to make his new shirt _bleed." _I point at his flannel shirt, on top of the pile.

Edward plays right along. "I'm very particular about my laundry," he says coldly.

Emmett looks unimpressed. "Just put it on cold." He adds his things to the pile.

Edward smirks at me and leaves the room, brushing past Emmett. "Exactly," I hear him mutter.


	11. Chapter 11

**Author's Note: Here's a little treat for all you darlings clamoring for longer chapters...but I must warn you I think it's an aberration. As for EPOV, mm, feels like cheating to me. I want to see if I can get his mindset across, at the right moments, without resorting to that. Plus, I think not exactly knowing makes it easier to feel the exciting agony that Bella's feeling, right? Also thank you, thank you very much for the reviews, I'm sorry I don't answer them all (I'm sure you'd rather I work on the story, right?) but rest assured I relish every one... **

"This was in my mailbox." I have just sat down at a table in a café with Ms. Brandon, who is handing me a small envelope. It's our second meeting, on the Friday of the first week of school. Our first meeting, on the Tuesday of that same week, had taken place in her office in the Art Building.

For our first meeting, I had arrived at her office at the agreed time but found it empty. This gave me a chance to take a look around. I say office but the room was more of a small studio, with tall windows letting in plenty of dim gray light. There's no proper desk, but a drafting table that is covered with messy piles of paper and another table, a smooth, broad, heavy wooden one that is covered with recent and ancient splashes and blobs of oil paint, acrylic paint, rubber cement, god knows what. She's got an impressive array of supplies lined up on the table and the neighboring shelves and cabinets—earthenware jars full of paintbrushes, boxes of pastels, tubes of oil paints, Exacto knives and straightedges, stacks of handmade art paper in a variety of sizes, colors, and weights. Some small blank canvases stretched on frames. She's got a small portable electric burner with a saucepan and a wooden spoon, I wonder what that is for. The walls and available surfaces of the room are absolutely plastered with such a mind-boggling array of pieces of art in such a wide variety of media that I know they can't be all hers, and indeed some appear to be rather old. There are paintings on canvas, some abstract and some hyperrealist, there are pastel sketches of male nudes, there is a series of lithographs of antique maps of the East Coast, there is a small metalwork sculpture of a man's head with what appears to be a removeable nose strapped on with a leather strap and buckle, and another that brings to mind the celestial spheres, there is a woodblock print of a snarling wolf…

I turn my head at the sound of the door opening. "Oh, hello, there you are, sorry." A small, pretty woman with short, dark hair bursts into the room like a whirling dervish, her arms full of papers, folders, and packages, which are overflowing and starting to slip onto the floor as she nudges the door closed behind her with her elbow. "You must be Bella," She dumps the entire load on the table and comes over to shake my hand, beaming at me. She is very petite and has a superchic, sexy pixie cut that usually only French actresses can pull off successfully. I have no idea how old she might be.

"Please, come sit with me." She gestures to a blue velvet loveseat. "Would you like some tea?"

"No, thank you, I'm fine."

"You must forgive me for being late, I'm all at sixes and sevens today. I've just arrived back this morning from New York." She has a quick way of talking and she waves her hands around in an endearing way. She also has a very engaging smile and has brought a sort of exciting burst of energy into the room with her.

She settles down next to me on the sofa and turns towards me, crossing one knee over the other. She is wearing long, wide black woolen trousers and an exquisitely simple ivory silk blouse that looks so smooth and soft I want to touch it. She is also wearing adorable black boots with a rounded, forties toe and a row of leather buttons up the side. Her feet are tiny, like the rest of her. I'm slightly intimidated by how well dressed she is; I'm wearing my usual jeans and a pair of black Chuck Taylors. I pull my feet under the sofa.

"First of all, do you have any questions for me?"

I ask her about her background, why she's teaching in the art department but is now embarking on teaching a year-long seminar in psychology as well as art, with me as her sole student.

"Oh, I used to be in the Psych department. I have a B.A. and a Master's in psychology. But now I'm going for a Master's in Fine Arts. To be frank, I had to get out of psychology."

That's interesting. "Why?"

She tilts her head to one side and looks at the ceiling. Then she glances at me. "I lost my faith."

"But…psychology is not faith. It's science," I object.

"Oh?" she smiles mischievously at me. "I'm not too sure about that. But we'll get into all that. I decided not to continue towards a PhD in that area, but I am still practicing as a psychologist. I work at the university hospital, and I see a small number of patients for talk therapy. At this point my patients have been with me for a while, I don't take new ones very often."

"Anyway, enough about me. I have your transcript and all your paperwork, I know a bit about you. I know you're a clever girl. I'm curious to see your artwork, though. Did you bring your portfolio?" She glances at the large black folder in my hands. I hand it over and she stands up, bringing it to her wooden table to untie. She flips through, inspecting my work from high school. I was pretty keen on drawing from grade school on, and took a few art classes in high school. Most of what is in there are still lifes, as well as some studies of my family and friends and the next-door neighbors' dog. She is looking everything over, nodding slowly, and holds up one.

"What is this?"

"Tessellation." I have a number of tessellations.

"Mm-hm."

She holds up another, an impossible construction. "Fan of Escher?"

"I was kind of obsessed with him in ninth grade." She flips through everything, then goes back to the beginning and looks at the first few again, lingering over the arrangements of fruit and flowers done in pastel. Finally she turns back to me, leaning against the table with her hands behind her.

"All right, Bella, I have to be honest with you here. These are very nice but I can't stand still lifes."

Ugh. I've been warned that art class gets a little brutal at the college level but I wasn't quite expecting this; I've always had praise heaped on my drawing skills. People always think my pears are so lifelike. She comes and sits next to me again, smiling and patting my arm like a girlfriend having an intimate chat with me. "Oh, it's fine for showing off your technique, especially if you are a Dutch master. But I don't want to be looking at pictures of fruit." Her smile is so lovely and genuine that I have to giggle at this criticism, it seems sort of spot-on. She really is charismatic.

She goes on. "I want to be looking at art that makes me react on a gut level. Do you know what they call a still life in French?"

I know the answer but also I know better than to volunteer it like a goody two-shoes. I wait for her to make her point. "_Nature morte._ Dead nature." She draws out the word "dead."

She gets up again and goes back to the table, flipping through the pieces. "I want to see you create something that is _alive, _that is vital. Your style of drawing is tightly controlled and self regulated. I want to see you push your boundaries and explore more. Texture, sensuality, emotion that is meaningful to you."

She looks at me very directly. "I want to see you _express _yourself in a way these don't. These are very pretty, but they are devoid of emotion. They are exercises in a slavish rendition of reality or…mathematical patterns." She says this slightly dismissively, waving her hand over them.

Now she's leaning forward, gazing into my eyes as if she is peering into my soul. I half believe she can. Her enthusiasm is sort of infectious, I am getting excited about what she is saying. She could probably be a cult leader if she put her mind to it.

"You don't need to think too hard about the message you're conveying. People looking at your work are going to see in it what they need to see. If you are capturing something that is emotionally real to _you,_ they will pick up on that and they will react to it on an instinctual level. That's what we're after here."

She walks over to one of the cupboards and starts rummaging through it. "I think we're going to get you painting in oil. But we need to work up to that. We're going to start with sketches in charcoal."

She takes out a box of charcoal pencils and a large spiral-bound pad, and hands them over to me.

"Do you remember your dreams, Bella?" she asks.

This makes me go beet red. These last two nights…since Sunday, the day of my, er, conversation with Edward in the laundry room, during which he had admitted to me that he thought about me in a sexual way but at the same time had laid down a boundary between us, well, since then my dreams were going high voltage.

After he had left the laundry room, I had heard the front door close, like he had stepped outside for air. After starting the laundry I had gone straight up to my room and shut it myself in, throwing myself on the bed to try to think, despite the distracting throbbing between my legs. I was in a perfect blend of ecstasy and despair. He wanted me, but he didn't want me… or, rather, he didn't _want_ to want me. And the way he had spoken, this emotion that was seething just below the surface that he was determined to rein in, the way his eyes had _pierced _me… it was almost as if he had expected me to be afraid. Did he really think he was going to scare me? What a joke. Not when I _dreamed_ about him fucking me and drinking my blood, taking me and consuming me, and me loving every minute of it and wanting more, more, more.

He had left for Seattle not long after that. I had remained shut in my room. And I still had the shirt, but it didn't smell like him or the lake, now. I had started sleeping in it anyway. And now my dreams were becoming even more vivid and even more frustrating. I would be with him, naked, both of us naked, in a bed, in a meadow, on the washing machine, touching and kissing and biting and licking everywhere, but just as he was on the point of making me his, something would interfere, something would prevent it, and I would wake up sopping wet and desperately unsatisfied.

I snap back into reality. Ms. Brandon is looking at me expectantly and slightly suspiciously.

"Um, yes. I do remember my dreams. Sometimes." My face is burning.

She cocks a perfectly manicured eyebrow at me. "Excellent."

She comes over again to sit next to me. She seems to have difficulty staying in one place.

"As far as subject matter goes, I want you to dig around in your id. Use what's most disturbing or unsettling or difficult to understand in your dreams as fodder for your artwork. Art is a pathway to understanding your own mind. And remember, it's for you, it's not for anyone else."

If she only knew.

Fast forward three days. For our next meeting, she's asked me to join her not in her office but in a café near campus. She has led us upstairs to a quiet corner and found us a couple of armchairs facing an unlit fireplace, a little away from the other tables. As we walked upstairs I admired her sweater—snow-white cashmere, wrapping around her in a complicated and elegant way. All her clothes make me want to stroke them. She is wearing beautiful little pearl earrings shaped like teardrops. I am wondering how she affords to dress like this on whatever academic salary or stipend she gets. Must have family money.

"This was in my mailbox." She hands me a small envelope. I look at the address, confused. It is addressed to Ms. Isabella McCarty, care of Ms. Alice Brandon, Art Building Room 369. There is no stamp, it must have been sent through the campus mail. It is written in fountain pen in a careful, vertical cursive hand that reminds me of that of the various French exchange students we'd had pass through Port Angeles High during my time there. They all took copious notes on graph paper in remarkably similar, tidy cursive hands that went straight up-and-down instead of slanting to the right, which struck me at the time because I still remembered rousing the ire of Sister Cahoon in the third grade at my seeming inability to write cursive at a proper slant or to make my letters what she considered to be a legible size. Once I started at public high school I had simply started printing in all caps and never looked back.

I flip the envelope over. No return address. I tear it open and pull out a small, plain piece of thick white note paper. I quickly scan the first line:

_B. — I am ashamed of my behavior last weekend, in more than one respect._

My breath catches. My eye goes straight to the last line, signed simply "_E_."

_Oh my god. It's from Edward. _I glance at Ms. Brandon and shove the note back into the envelope. I can't read this right now, in front of her. I slide the note into the front pocket of my hoodie and quickly pick up the hot chocolate from the side table next to me, bringing it to my lips and blowing on it. My fingers are trembling and I can feel my cheeks burning. Ms. Brandon tilts her head toward me and raises an eyebrow at me. She looks intrigued. I stare back at her like a deer in the headlights. My thoughts are racing, I am desperate to be alone with the note. _Who sends a _note?_ Why is he sending it to me though _her? _What does it _say?

She is obviously curious but prevented by common politeness from asking me about it, given that she hardly knows me. "Would you like to go ahead and read that?" she asks, like an adult asking a child if they would like to open their birthday presents now. I look at her blankly for another moment, then give up and laugh. "Yes," I admit.

"Go ahead, I'm not in a hurry. May I look over your sketch?"

"Yes, of course." I hand her my folder.

I stand up and walk across the room to a bank of windows and open it, my back to her.

_B. — I am ashamed of my behavior last weekend, in more than one respect. In particular, my episode of logorrhea on Monday morning. What I said to you and the manner in which I said it were unfair, to say the least. Please do me the kind favor of forgetting everything I said — chalk it up to lack of sleep. I have great esteem for you and would like for us to be friends._

_— E._

My thoughts are flying. _Well, as to why he sent it to me through Ms. Brandon, that's easy. He didn't want to send it to the house in case Emmett opened it. Or in case he simply recognized his writing, it _is _pretty distinctive, and since Emmett has been his student I'm sure he is familiar with it. _I am a weird mixture of thrilled and dissatisfied. I am thrilled that he would _write _to me. I am thrilled that he is _concerned_ enough to write to me. He's been thinking about it. Worrying about it. All week. He's having trouble managing his behavior towards me. "In more than one respect"…I wonder what else he is ashamed of, exactly. But…"friends"? That's almost as bad as "sister." "Esteem"? Ugh, it's so formal and...restrained. Maybe he's just trying to manage the situation? I haven't seen him all week, and I won't be surprised if he stays away from me for a while, like he's already done before, and anyway school has started and he's bound to actually be busy. But at some point we're going to see each other. In company. He's probably concerned about how _that's _going to go.

I stuff the note back in the envelope and the envelope back in my pocket, and return to my armchair. Ms. Brandon is examining my sketches.

"Thanks, Ms. Brandon."

"Please, call me Alice. This…" she glances down at the sketches in her lap, "is fantastic. You've done far more work than I expected. And what you've done is…arresting." She had requested one sketch, and I produced five. The first week of school was not overly intense, with classes just settling in and not a ton of homework, and, frankly, what was going on in my subconscious at night was capturing my waking attention anyway so it hadn't been hard to work on these. Actually, it had been hard to focus on anything else.

"May I ask you a personal question, Bella? You don't have to answer."

"All right."

She looks at me curiously. "Do you…have a boyfriend?"

I stare at her. Why is she asking me this? "Um, no."

"Mm hm. And these are taken, more or less, from your own dreams?" She holds up a sketch of a female nude, supine, head thrown back in ecstasy as a male figure crouching above her buries his face in the crook of her neck.

I nod, mute.

"Well, don't take this the wrong way, but it's just so interesting…these sketches of yours, if you look at them from a perspective of Jungian dream interpretation…and I only indulge in Jungian dream interpretation in the same way that I indulge in reading my daily horoscope, as a sort of silly but satisfying amusement…but, well, they are simply classic manifestations of sexual frustration. And," she adds, glancing at me for just a moment, "sexual obsession."

She pauses. "These are quite erotic, from a female perspective."

I hold my breath, feeling exposed and yet, somehow, understood. She puts the sketches back in the folder, closes it, and hands it to me. She picks up her espresso cup and takes a small sip.

"No boyfriend in the offing? Is there someone that you have your eye on?" she asks, conversationally.

"No."

"You're a terrible liar."

I have to laugh at this. I set the folder on the floor and pick up my mug of chocolate, leaning back in the chair and holding it with two hands.

"Tell me about him."

I shrug at this, and she says, "Start with something easy. What does he look like?"

"Tall…" I suddenly think, _I can sort of talk to her about it, it would be a relief, but I should be discreet. Not a hundred percent honest._ "Dark….and handsome."

She laughs merrily at that.

"Tall, I'll buy. Do you think he's interested in you?" she asks.

"Maybe," I smile. "Yes. But we can't."

"Oh, interesting. Why not?"

"There're some circumstances."

"For example…" she prods.

"He's older than me."

"Oh. How delicious. How much older?"

"Enough that it's an issue."

"Is that all?"

"No."

"Is he married?"

"Yuck, no."

"Let's see…is he your teacher?"

"No. He's…a friend of the family." This probably makes it sound like he is my dad's age. But whatever, I don't want to be overly accurate.

"And it seems you two have discussed the situation."

"Well, discussed is too elaborate a word. But he basically told me he can't…be with me. That he shouldn't. Even though he thinks about it."

"I see. That makes sense," she says, glancing at the folder. "If he is resisting you, because he considers you too young, well, that speaks well of him."

"I guess."

"Small consolation. Or, his integrity makes him even more attractive?"

I drop my gaze. "Yes."

"Would you like my advice? Not in a professional way, just as a friend."

I smile widely at her. "Please."

"If he feels constrained by your age, or these other circumstances, you are going to have to be aggressive. If he's a good guy he might simply manage to restrain himself. You can't rely on his making the first move."

"So…you mean I have to make a move? Like, throw myself at him?" I had been thinking a lot this week about that. Seems like it might not go well. I mean, I _had_ kissed him on the cheek, and look where that gotten me.

Her brows knit. "Not _exactly._ This is going to sound very un-P.C., but I think it's not generally a good idea for the woman to be the aggressor in these situations. Men may claim they like the idea, perhaps as a novelty, but in actual practice, they like to be the pursuer. And they like a bit of a challenge. Generally speaking, our best bet is signaling interest."

"What do you mean by signaling?"

"Body language. We all understand it on a subconscious, if not conscious, level. Looking at him, smiling at him, laughing at what he says, leaning towards him, mirroring his gestures, playing with your hair, tilting your head, exposing your palms, exposing your wrists, touching him…"

"Exposing my wrists?"

"Gesture of submission, vulnerability. But presumably you've already done those things, whether you knew it or not. In a situation like this, you have to go beyond that. You have to make it so tempting that he can't resist, that he gives into the naughtiness of it. You have to provoke him."

"So you think I _should_ try to make something happen with him."

She frowns. "Of course."

"But…how do you know he's not right to…um….deny me?"

"Oh, I'm always on the side of love. Even if it's unwise. That's just the artist in me, I guess."

She adds, "Judging from your previous artwork and your school transcript, you've always been very wise. Judging from your current artwork, I think it's time for you to get unwise."


	12. Chapter 12

After Ms. Brandon—Alice—assigned me some psychology reading and left, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the café, working on my calculus problem sets and puzzling over the note.

I am not sure I'm convinced of what Alice is saying to me, and in particular I'm not sure I'm up to playing this game of provoking a man to…what? Go to bed with me, against his better judgment? Fall for me? Now that I'm alone, the idea seems kind of preposterous.

But it has put me in a different mindset. If not for Alice, I'd probably be in a different mode: probably thinking to _call _him. And knowing me, I'd call him and end up trying to reassure him, saying that we all say things we don't mean and of course I'd forget all about it. But that wasn't what I wanted to say at all, so I had better not call him.

Also, I am thinking about what she had said about mirroring him. He chose to write to me, so I should answer in kind. Writing a note is, when I think about it, easier to control than a phone call or even an e-mail or text, because there is no immediate response to contend with. Is this why he chose it? He's trying to regain control over our interaction. I threw him off balance by losing my temper and exposing my definitely unsisterly feelings for him, but except for that moment in the laundry room, he's always been in control of our interactions. _He _decides whether we're talking to each other or not, whether we're exchanging glances, whether he's flirting with me or not.

He might regret _saying _what he did, but that doesn't mean he doesn't _feel _it. He just slipped up and reacted to me.

OK. I want to get more reactions out of him. Therefore I have to not reassure him, I have to keep him off balance. I need to make him sweat over whatever it is he's after with this note he's sent me. I need to not answer him immediately and I have to be indirect when I do answer.

Still, I have no idea what to write back. It isn't until later that night, when I am getting ready for bed, that I figure it out.

As I'm sliding his shirt over my head, I wonder what he would think if he knew that I'm sleeping in it. This shirt of his, that I wanted to keep because it smelled like him, now just smells like me. Then it strikes me. Maybe I should send him the shirt.

I give it a sniff. I've been wearing it all week, maybe it's a little ripe. But I could wash it, and wear it once…just so it loses its fresh laundry scent and carries _my _scent_—_and send it to him. I start giggling at the idea. I could write a disarming little note with it, not the sort of note you would write if you're returning a guy's stuff because it's over between you. No, I'd write something teasing, that is the way I like Edward best, when he is _teasing _me.

I mull it over all weekend and although I can't decide whether it is brilliant or batty, I can't shake the idea, so I go with it. On Sunday I wash the shirt and wear it to bed, and Monday morning I dig a plain note card out of my desk drawer and write,

_Dear Sir — Thank you for the gallant loan of your shirt. I thought I should send it back to you before it turns into my regular nightshirt. It's very cozy. I hope I see you before September is over. — B_

I wrap the note and the shirt in brown craft paper, tie it with string, and go online to get his office address. For a moment I wonder if this is too stalkerish, but if so, his getting that note to me was one level up in stalkermanship. The next trick is figuring out how to get it into the campus mail. I bring it with me to campus, and on the way to biology class I pass the biology department office, so I go in and ask the girl sitting at the desk if she could put it in their outgoing mail to get it over to Padelford Hall. She says no problem.

-O-O-O-O-O-

I get my response thirty-six hours later, and lord knows what mode he's in now because it comes through the channel I'm least expecting.

On Tuesday night I'm sitting on the couch with Emmett watching Jon Stewart. Emmett has his laptop open on his lap and is noodling around with it while he watches, and when his e-mail beeps he reads the incoming message, then grunts and hands the computer over to me.

...from: ecullen*math. washington. edu

...subject: movie night

...to: emccarty*orthop. washington. edu

...tell Bella that Polanski's _Tess_ is showing at Gas Works Park this Fri

...do you guys want to go

...last outdoor movie night of the season unless it rains

_Tess. The movie version of the book I was reading that day on the couch. But what the heck is he doing sending this via _Emmett_?_

"What movie is that?" Emmett asks.

I look at Emmett, calculating. "Costume drama, I think." I google it and scan the description on Wikipedia. "Wow, 190 minutes."

Emmett snorts derisively. _Does Edward know there's no way on earth Emmett would *ever* go see this movie?_

The show is mid-segment and Emmett is giving it his full attention now. I try to keep my voice languid. "I might go, I like that book. I'll e-mail him back." _Will he think that is too weird, me going to the movies with Edward alone?_ "There's a girl in my biol section who might want to go, too. We were bonding over late-nineteenth-century British lit." Emmett rolls his eyes and keeps watching TV. _Good._

I go back to the e-mail. I forward it to myself, then delete it from Emmett's inbox and, for good measure, the forwarded one from his "sent" mail. Hopefully he will forget its very existence. I hand the computer back to him.

I wait impatiently for the show to end, then make a show of stretching and yawning and taking myself off to bed. Once safely in my room I get on my own computer, pick up the e-mail, and forward it back to Edward.

...from: izzymac*gmail. com

...subject: movie night

...to: ecullen*math. washington. edu

...yes

...will meet you there

I hit "send" before I can overthink it. Then I brush teeth, put on a t-shirt, turn off the light, and lie down to overthink it.

_Calm down, Bella. This isn't a date. He just asked you and your _brother_ to a movie. I have no idea what this is._

**_Author's Note: Oh that Edward...maybe he just wants someone to know where she is in case he decides not to bring her back. Next update ETA 11:59pm Friday 9/30 Pacific Daylight Time..._**


	13. Chapter 13

On Friday evening I leave a note for Emmett saying vaguely that I'll be out late and I ride my bike down to Fremont. At first I'm a little concerned about the bike ride because I have to jack up my skirt kind of high—I'm actually wearing a dress, in fact I was so stymied by what to wear that I went out shopping in Ballard right after classes this morning and managed to find a super-cute wine-colored turtleneck sweater dress that I could actually afford—but it's OK because although the dress is pretty formfitting it's also pretty stretchy and I'm wearing dark knit tights and boots and of course a coat so it's not like you can _see _anything.

I get a little lost on the way so I get to the place with just a few minutes to spare before the movie starts. The movie is set up outdoors on a big lawn overlooking Lake Union. I'm weaving my way in and out of lawn chairs, inflatable mattresses, bean bags, and even couches—which makes me giggle, I can't believe people bring _couches—_when I spot Edward, sitting on a couch with his ankle crossed over one knee, eating Asian dumplings out of a take-out container with chopsticks. He's already spotted me and seems to be enjoying my bewilderment at seeing him on the couch. I walk up and stand in front of him.

"What is _this_?" I inquire, gesturing to the piece of furniture. "You didn't bring this, did you?"

He shakes his head. "No, they put some out. If you get here early you can snag one." I wonder how early he got here. "You can also rent bean bags, but I wasn't sure how many of us there'd be so I went for a couch."

He's gotten his hair cut. It's quite short on the sides, a little longer on top, much more kempt than the last time I saw him. I've always loved how wild his hair looks, but the short hair shows off his face, emphasizing his angular cheekbones and eyes in a way that takes my breath away. He's wearing a v-neck wool sweater and a checkered button-down shirt and he's so freaking hot in a buttoned-up way it's nearly painful.

For a moment I think it's too bad Emmett _isn't _here so that I'd be forced to squeeze in right next to Edward. I take off my coat—I don't care how chilly it is, I am going to show off this dress—and throw it down on the opposite side of the couch. I sit down as close to the middle as I can without being obvious. I pull up my legs and tuck them under me so I'm sort of tilted towards him. He uncrosses and crosses his other ankle so he's tilted towards me. He's sort of spread out but he's not _sprawled _on the couch. But he doesn't seem relaxed. He's sitting up pretty straight and eying me in a way I have to describe as _watchful._ He hands me the container of dumplings.

"Hungry?" he asks. "Have a gyoza."

"Thanks," I say. There's only one pair of chopsticks. He's letting me use his chopsticks. He leans down and picks up a bottle of Orangina from the grass near his feet and hands it to me.

"Thanks," I say again. Did he remember me drinking it at that barbecue? I'm feeling very shy about this whole thing but I force myself to seem casual.

"You got your hair cut," I inform him.

"Yes. At the last minute it turned out I had to teach a class this semester, so I had to clean up my act a bit."

"You clean up nice." I smirk at him, mostly to disguise the wave of jealousy I feel at the idea of his female students being able to sit there and stare at him for three hours a week, or whatever it is. "What subject?"

"Thanks. It's an upper-class seminar in imaginary numbers. Where's your chaperone?"

"Right. I gave him the night off. He'd never come see this." I pop a dumpling into my mouth and gesture with my chin towards the screen, where the "turn off your cell phone" reminder is starting.

He lifts one eyebrow and appears to be biting his tongue.

"I'm not afraid of you," I drawl, when I finish eating the gyoza.

He chuckles but keeps biting his tongue. The movie is starting. He leans over and whispers,

"So what's this movie about?"

I giggle at him and lean in to whisper back. "It's the tragic story of how women are stupid and men are brutes and hypocrites."

"Ah," he replies, nodding wisely.

I'm actually kind of interested in the movie, since I just read the book not that long ago, and it _looks _beautiful, but really all I want to do is look at him. But I don't want him to catch me mooning over him. When we get to the strawberry scene—where the villain, Alec, feeds a berry to Tess, his sort-of cousin and soon-to-be conquest, I glance over at him to find he's looking at me. He leans over and whispers,

"See, she can't resist strawberries either, she's going to get herself in trouble."

I smile and look away. I can't bear it. I sit there and wonder how I am going to get through this entire movie with him sitting right there, so close to me, but of course not touching me, and looking the way he does, and saying things like that. I glance at those ridiculously long legs of his, which are now stretched out in front of him, and his hands, folded over his belly. I feel like every nerve in my body is on red alert.

And before long, I am aware, as if this whole situation is not already fraught_ enough, _we're going to be coming up on the ravishment scene_. _When it comes I steal a look at him. He's watching the screen intently and I watch the reflected light of the film play over his features. He glances down, looking at my knees it seems, then looks at me. My heart is beating hard but I don't look away. He smiles slowly at me and I lose my nerve, turning my eyes to watch the screen again without comprehending what is happening on it. _I want him to take _me _into the woods and ravish me._

After another ten or fifteen minutes, he leans over again.

"Do you want to go?"

I look back at him in surprise.

"Yes." I wonder what made him ask. I was feeling so distracted and uncomfortable that maybe it was showing on my face.

He makes a motion to sit up, and I pick up my coat and stand up. We take the shortest path to come out of this part of the park that is cordoned off for the movie, coming out on the south side. There is an amazing view of downtown Seattle from this side of the park.

"Wow, look at that," I comment.

He looks down at me, then asks, sort of hesitantly, "Do you want to walk down and take a look?" He nods towards the water's edge.

I nod, not trusting myself to speak. He clears his throat. "Sorry, I kind of had to get out of there." He doesn't explain that remark. "Also, well, you can't talk during a movie."

We walk for a moment in silence, then he asks, in his more customary teasing tone, "So, how do you rate the forty minutes you saw?"

"Well, um, it was nicely shot. It did feel dated, though, it's funny how when you see period pieces that were made during another decade, they feel so much more out of date than a period piece made _now._"

"Right, you don't want your period pieces to feel too out of date," he laughs.

I laugh at this. "Clearly not. Also, I also thought Nastassja Kinski was a weird choice for Tess. She really doesn't look or sound English…or, well, sometimes she did, I suppose she was supposed to have some kind of English countryside-type accent, but other times not. She seems too exotic. What is she, Russian?" I've kind of been wanting to get on the subject of his background.

"She's German. She's Klaus Kinski's daughter."

He goes on. "The reason she's cast in this is that she was having an affair with Roman Polanski. When he was 43 and she was 16." We've reached the edge of the lake. There's a the beginning of a wooden fence along the edge where the shore is a little steeper. "Of course he's a well-known perv."

This is awkward. I don't answer. Yes, I know Polanski is a well-known perv, but I am not going down this road with him. Plus, Edward's not 43.

We walk over to the fence. I throw my coat over it and climb up to perch on it. It's easier to talk to him if our heights are a little closer. His mention of Roman Polanski has got me thinking, though,

"That explains that scene in the woods."

"What do you mean?" He leans on the fence next to me.

Oh dear, now I'm wading into it. "Um, it seemed more…ambiguous in the movie than in the book."

"Oh?"

"Like, it seemed more like she was going along with it."

"Really?" he looks at me.

"Well, yes. I was expecting her to put up more of a fight."

"You're hard on poor Tess."

"I don't want to blame the victim, obviously. But, I mean, come on, she was raised on a farm. She knows what's what."

"Maybe she was intimidated."

"She didn't seem intimidated. She seemed like she felt sorry for him, for knocking him off the horse, and just wanted to be nice. But, it didn't seem believable to be that a country girl like her wouldn't be more…savvy."

"So you thought she knew what she was getting into."

I shrug. "I guess I thought Polanski made it seem more like a seduction."

"Hm." He crosses his arms and looks at his feet. We spend a couple of minutes in silence, admiring the lights reflected on the water.

Finally he tilts is head towards me and starts fiddling with the buttons on my coat, which is draped on the fence between us. He's leaning on one elbow so that my head is higher than his.

"So it seems like you're not mad at me anymore for calling you little sister."

I look at him but he's still looking down. "No, I'm not mad at you. But…is that _really _how you think of me?" I ask coyly.

"No, that's not how I think of you. I believe I told you that." He's still not looking at me.

"I thought I was supposed to forget all about that."

He breaks into a smile and looks up at me, then turns his head away. I see his Adam's apple bob.

There's another moment of silence, and he seems so uncomfortable that I go into nervous chatty mode.

"Your actual sister…does she live in Washington?"

"No. She lives abroad."

_Hm. _"Rosalie told me you and your dad came here from Russia."

A flash of annoyance passes through his eyes. "Romania, actually."

_Romania? _I can't help smiling. "That's rich."

"What do you mean?"

"Next you're going to tell me Transylvania, to be exact."

"Please, no vampire jokes. I've heard them all before."

"Cullen doesn't sound Romanian."

"It was Culinovschi. My dad changed it, he wanted to assimilate."

"How do you spell that?"

"c-u-l-i-n-o-v-s-c-h-i"

"I see why he changed it."

"You remind me of Emmett. Are you always this cheeky?"

"You love that about us."

"Yes, I do love that about you."This throws me for a loop. It takes me a moment to recover.

"Is your name really Edward?" I ask goadingly.

"With a u, but he changed that too. And he Anglicized his first name, Luguvalio, to Carlisle."

"How do you get Carlisle out of Luguvalio?"

"It's the English version of a Roman place name. It's a place in Cumbria, in England. My paternal grandmother was English."

"How old were you when you came here?"

"Ten. First we were in Chicago—" _Ah, yes, the Cubs hat_ "—there are a lot of Romanians there. Then Seattle."

He goes on. "I was actually his ticket out of Romania. They let us travel to Austria for a math competition, when I was in fourth grade."

"But what about the rest of your family?"

"They're still there. That is, my sister is there. She lives with my aunt and uncle."

"What about your mother?"

"My mother left."

"She left Romania?"

"No, she left the family." _Yikes._

"How often do you see your sister?"

"Just a couple of times, since Romania opened up."

"What's her name?"

"Esmé. After my mother."

"Does she want to come live here?"

He glances at me. "It's complicated. I mean, with my dad gone, I think it seems odd to her to come here just with me. Plus, she's a pianist, a serious pianist, she doesn't want to disrupt her training."

He straightens up, still leaning against the fence, but looking out over the water. I study his profile, just like during the movie.

The fence is digging into my backside a little so I shift and then bobble, losing my balance just for a moment. He puts his hand on the small of my back to steady me.

"Are you going to fall off this fence?" he asks, smiling.

"I might," I say lightly.

He's still touching my back. "We don't want you to _break _anything," he says, slightly sarcastically.

He slides his hand down and grasps my formerly broken wrist.

"Let me see."

I use my legs to brace myself and let him pick up my left wrist.

"Is it better?" he asks.

"It's better," I say, rotating my hand to illustrate it.

"When did you get the cast off?"

"When you guys went camping."

"Your birthday weekend." He knits his brows. "You know, it's funny, I didn't notice it then."

He is still holding my wrist, he wraps his hand around it, as if he's measuring the size of it. His long fingers overlap quite a bit.

"Fragile little thing."

Then he lifts it to his mouth and kisses the inside of my wrist.

The butterflies in my stomach are fluttering so wildly and erratically I feel like I _will_ fall off this fence. We stare at each other for a moment, then he drops my wrist. He grasps the fence, then slides his other hand around my waist and kisses me full on the mouth. Instantly my hands are in his hair, stroking the soft, bristly short hair at the nape of his neck and exploring upwards. He moves closer—he's not pressed up against me, quite, but he's standing between my knees, both arms around my waist, and his lips are urgently exploring mine. When his tongue sweeps my bottom lip I moan, opening my mouth eagerly to let him in, and the rush of lust I feel when our tongues meet makes me dizzy. He can have me, right now, on this fence, I have never wanted anything so bad. And then, oh, no—

He pulls away, dragging his hands along my thighs as he loosens his hold on my waist, and rotates away from me so that he is no longer facing me, but standing next to me leaning back against the fence again. He's looking at the ground and he releases his breath in a _whoosh _as if he's been holding it. Finally he glances at me. "We should go."

_You have _got _to be kidding me, _my brain screams. I open my mouth to protest, but he looks so distraught that I say nothing. He picks up my coat and holds it up. I don't move to get off the fence, I just look at him, but he meets my look and waits. I jump down from the fence and slide one arm into my coat and let him help me put it on.

"How did you get here?" he asks.

"Bike."

He smiles crookedly at me. "I'll give you a ride home. Where's your bike?"

We walk back up towards the parking in silence. I'm in a state of shock. I'm so turned on I can barely walk straight, I'm all slippery and quivery and I can't understand how he could just stop like that. By the time we get to the bike rack I am feeling completely pissed off. _What the hell is he doing. How can he jerk me around like this? Obviously I was liking being kissed, obviously he wants it too, why doesn't he just give in?_

I unlock the bike and look at him coldly and expectantly.

"I'm over here." He leads us over to his car, which is a sleek-looking silver vintage Volvo from the sixties. It has a bike rack on the back and he lifts up my bike and attaches it. He hands me my helmet and goes around and opens the passenger door for me.

I slide in. The inside has that old leather smell and the dashboard and gear shift have that pared-down look of another era, they remind me of the inside of the seaplane that Lauren's dad keeps, which I've flown in a few times. I'm getting more and more pissed and I feel an urge to confront him. _What would Alice do._

"Why did you ask me here tonight?" I ask him, petulantly, as soon as he's in the car and his door is shut.

He flips on the headlights, starts the car, shifts into reverse, and pulls up sharply on the parking brake before releasing it. All his actions are so decisive and neat-handed, I love watching him. Then he puts both hands on the bottom of the steering wheel, gripping it tightly for a moment and then stroking the leather.

"That package you sent me…it disturbed me." He gives me a strangely intense look, then drops his eyes to his hands. I have the sudden knowledge that he wasn't disturbed in a _bad _way. He didn't think it was creepy. He thought it was hot. This disarms me.

"Did I cross a line?" I ask, coyly, and when his eyes flash to me I smile sweetly at him. His look goes more intense, darker, and I'm suddenly reminded of that first night in the bar, when I asked him to choose a drink for me. He looks away and swipes his hand across his mouth.

He takes a deep breath and goes on.

"It was selfish of me, self-indulgent, but I wanted to see you, to… hm…make sure everything was OK between us. I thought that it might be better if we were alone next time I saw you. Since the last time I saw you things were a little volatile."

"So…are things OK between us?" I ask him. It doesn't seem like they are, at this point.

He leans his head back on the headrest and keeps his eyes trained on the windshield. "Things are too OK between us," he mutters, more to himself than to me.

_He is so frustrating. _"If you wanted to be alone with me, why did you ask Emmett?"

He breaks into a grin. "I know Emmett's taste. But…I wanted to keep it above-board, you know."

He stops smiling and goes on. "I didn't want to give you the wrong idea. And now, tonight, I go and give you the wrong idea." He clears his throat. "That thing, back at the fence…I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that."

"Please don't say that. I liked it," I murmur, eyes on my lap. My hands are on my lap, wrists up. _Gesture of …what was it? Surrender?_

He shakes his head at me. "You don't know what you're getting into, Bella. I'm not good for you."

I'm already too far in. His words are meaningless to me; didn't Emmett warn me about him the second time I saw him? That seems ages ago now. I am so forcefully drawn to him I can't imagine anything about him repelling me.

"It doesn't matter," I whisper. "I don't care. I think about you all the time." I want him to stop talking, to just start kissing me again. Please. _Please._

"Fuck," he spits out, rubbing his eyes with his palms. He turns back to me, his eyes burning into mine. "Here it is, Bella. We can't do this. And, as I've demonstrated tonight, I can't be alone with you. And…" he drops his eyes and picks up my wrist, gripping it tightly. He looks intently at me again. "I want you to behave yourself."

In any other circumstances I would expect to laugh at his words, but something about his serious look and the way he's gripping my wrist is stopping me short…and also exciting me. But then again, everything he does seems to excite me. I'm not sure if he means that I should be careful around other people, which of course I consider to be in my self-interest, or around _him..._which I don't consider to be in my self-interest.

"You deserve something…simpler. Something easier. I'm not good for you," he repeats. He drops my wrist, then backs up the car. He drives me home in dead silence.

- O - O - O - O -

I unlock the front door quietly, stealthily, but when I open it I find Emmett lying on the couch, half-asleep, watching TV. "Hey Bella."

"Hey."

"What time is it?"

"I don't know."

"What did you get up to tonight?"

_Crap. What do I say. _"Oh, I went to see that movie," I say, fauxchalantly.

"What movie."

"_Tess."_

He props himself up on one elbow. "You went to that movie with Edward?" he asks, sharply.

"And some other people. I invited that girl I told you about, from bio. And, uh, Edward brought some girl."

He snickers. "Uh-oh, don't tell Tanya."

I can't suppress a scoffing sound at this." Don't worry, I won't. But, I don't know if it was like _that_."

Is baldly lying to Emmett only digging myself into a hole? Not sure. But now I have an excuse to e-mail Edward.

**Author's Note. I have a few remarks to make:**

**1. Sorry, Russian Federation readers. I'm sure you liked the idea that E was Russian. But there are 23 happy Romanians reading this.**

**2. Luguvalio Culinovschi! That shit is tight!**

**3. Next update by next Friday. Would normally be Tues/Wed but I'm not sure I can keep up this twice-a-week business. I am obsessed, however, so we'll see.**

**4. The kiss in this chapter was going to be more chaste but Edward is apparently getting impatient with me. Hee hee. Don't worry, people, he's going to lose it soon.**


	14. Chapter 14

**A/N: This is a do-over! This chapter wasn't sitting well with me, so I've reworked and expanded it. Things were going a little too smoothly, Bella needed to need the pep talk from Alice more, and plus I realized I had some other little plot threads to weave in there before the next chapter hits. I'm still aiming to have _that_ one ready for this weekend.**

Tuesday evening I'm sitting at the kitchen table finishing up a calculus problem set when Emmett comes into the room. "Are you still here? I thought you were going out."

"I am, I just have to finish this problem set. I'm having trouble on the last one."

He comes over to look. "Sorry, I don't think I can help you…it's been too long."

He pulls some sour cream dip out of the fridge. "Where are you going tonight?" he asks me.

"I'm going to the opening of painting show at a gallery with Ms. Brandon. She wanted me to see it."

"OK, well, so you know we're going to need the table soon. Some guys are coming over for poker night. I'm going to get in the shower."

He leaves the room and there's a knock at the door. I hear Emmett open the door and greet someone. "Oh, hey, Edward, come in." My heart starts pounding.

Emmett pokes his head back into the kitchen. "OK, Bella, here's your man."

I look up at Emmett, totally startled. _My man? _Edward is right behind him, looking at me and appearing equally startled. Emmett, blissfully unaware of the discomfort he's caused, continues,

"He can help you with that problem, I bet." _Oh. _He turns to Edward. "I'm gonna jump in the shower, help yourself to a beer."

Edward goes over to the fridge and takes his sweet time about choosing a beer, then finally comes over to look over my shoulder. "What's the problem?" he asks. He sounds cautious.

"It's nothing, I'm just finishing this up."

He pulls a chair around from the side of the table and sits down next to me.

"Are you playing cards with us?" he asks me in a low voice. "I thought it was guys only tonight."

I knit my brows. "No, I'm going out."

He nods. "OK. You know I wouldn't have come over like this if I thought you were going to be here. Emmett said you were going to be out."

_What does this mean? Did he come over expecting to not see me? _Hoping_ to not see me? _I narrow my eyes at him. "You don't need to _avoid _me."

He sighs and shakes his head slightly. "I didn't mean that, I just didn't mean to surprise you."

"Hey." Jasper comes into the kitchen.

Edward glances up at him. "Hey." He turns back to me, peering at the handout. "Which one is giving you trouble?" I'm not sure if he's asking for my benefit, or Jasper's.

I point it out. "I'm supposed to find the slope of a curve using the difference quotient."

"And what have you got here?" He points to my work below, tilting his head towards me as he looks it over.

"M equals delta y over delta x."

"Well, that's going to give you average slope but you want to find the slope at a point, do you not?"

"Yes," I answer, a slight edge to my voice. I'm annoyed at what he's just said about how he thought it was safe to come over because I wasn't going to be here, annoyed at how awkward things currently seem between us, and also annoyed that I can't get this problem right. I take a deep breath and try to clear my head so that he won't think I'm an idiot.

He takes the mechanical pencil out of my hand and slides a piece of my scratch paper towards himself. He points to the illustration of the curve on the handout, then starts jotting down an equation, his handwriting quick but neat. He pauses to point back at the charted curve when he mentions specific points..

"Ok, so, the slope at one, one can be approximated by the slope of the secant through four, sixteen." He reduces this equation and comes up with five. "But we could get a better approximation if we move the point closer to one, one, for example three, nine." He reduces this and comes up with four. "Even better would be the point two, four." He works this out to three.

"If we got really close to one, one—say, one-point-one, one-point-two-one, the approximation would get better still. So how far can we go?" He extrapolates from this to get a general function, which he writes out rapidly. "This is called the difference quotient of ƒ at _a_. So if you are asked to find the slope using the difference quotient, this is what you use. Do you understand?"

I nod. I'm feeling dazzled by his competence, not to mention his nice handwriting. I must be a true nerd girl to be thrilled by watching someone do algebraic equations. I also notice that my hands feel slightly trembly, the way they always do when I first see him. I put them between my knees and squeeze them.

"OK, show me what I just showed you." He hands the pencil back to me and turns over his scratch paper. I take the pencil and manage to reproduce his function.

"Good girl. Now do the problem."

He glances over at Jasper, who is chopping up cilantro and sprinkling it over the contents of a big wooden bowl. "Whatcha making there, Jazz?" he asks him.

Jasper brings the bowl of guacamole and another of chips over and sets them on the table. There's another knock at the door. "Dig in. I'll get that," he says on his way out of the room.

Edward watches me write out my solution, then glances at me and nods. His expression is unreadable.

"Thank you," I tell him.

A female voice sings out his name.

"Ed-ward." He rolls his eyes exaggeratedly to the ceiling, then turns his head to look at her.

"Tanya," he says, sighing again. I look up at her, and she's looking at me. She has a questioning look, but then her eyes drop to my homework pages.

"Ah, is this a new gig for you, tutoring underclassmen?" she says snidely. She ruffles his hair and leans down to stage-whisper in his ear. "Sorry about the other night."

The familiarity of her gesture sears my chest with a wave of jealousy. He doesn't look at all happy to see her, and yet she knows him so well, she can just _touch _him. And what is this thing she's talking about, _the other night. _I have to get out of this room before anyone sees how upset this is making me. I put my pencil and calculator into my pencil bag and zip it closed.

"No worries," Edward tells her, his voice flat. Then in a fluid motion he pulls his chair back to the side of the table where he had pulled it out and slides around to the opposite end of the table. She sits down at the side of the table between us and takes a chip laden with guacamole.

"Rosalie here yet?" she asks.

"No. She coming too?"

"Yes."

I stand up and start shuffling my papers into a pile. There's another knock at the door.

"So much for boys' night," he offers, blandly.

Tanya looks up at me through her long lashes. She really is pretty, with icy blue eyes and reddish freckles over her nose. "Aren't you staying, Bella?" she asks, in a tone that says she rather hopes I don't. "Maybe Edward could teach you to count cards. We can't ever play blackjack with him."

I give her a half-smile that probably looks horrified. "No, I have plans."

"Hot date?" she drawls. I can't help but glance at Edward. He's looking intently at me. I can feel my face going hot, but before I can explain, Jasper's calling me. "Bella, your friend is here."

"Bye," I tell Edward, then glance back at Tanya, and hightail it out of the room. Maybe he thinks it's better for us not to be alone, but I sure am finding it exquisitely stressful to be around certain other people with him.

- O – O – O – O - O -

I follow Alice down the front walk to her car, which is a brand spanking new Nissan Leaf—"It's totally electric!" she tells me, excitedly—feeling shell-shocked by that entire interaction. As she drives us over to the gallery, she gives me an overview of the show we're about to see, as well as the artist, who is a former teacher of hers. The gallery is in a renovated warehouse on one of the piers at the downtown waterfront, and the drive is short. And as we're walking up the interior stairs, she leans towards me and asks,

"How are you tonight, Bella? Your quietness has a different quality from usual."

I let out a long breath and smile wryly at her.

She cocks her head inquisitively at me. "Rough evening?"

"Well, disconcerting."

"Does it involve a certain mystery man?"

I nod.

"Oh, you'll have to tell me _all _about it," she says, practically rubbing her hands together. She holds the door open for me. "Let me just say hello to Martha."

Twenty minutes later, she's said hello and introduced me to the artist and a few other friends or acquaintances, and I've somehow acquired a campari and orange—Alice says it's more a restorative than a cocktail and really, dear, I seem like I need it. It's too bitter to drink at any speed that puts me in danger of getting tipsy. But it does seem to loosen my tongue and I find myself standing with Alice in an upstairs portion of the gallery among enormous, fleshy naked ladies painted on ceiling-to-floor canvasses, with people milling all around us, rapidly pouring out the entire story to her in a near-whisper. I start with the part where things seemed to be going well, with the quasi–movie date and the kiss, and then the part where Edward put the brakes on and now it's all going downhill and awkward.

"OK, so you're telling me…he invited you to go see a movie about an inexperienced young woman who is taken advantage of by an older cousin and has her life ruined…in which the starring actress was, in real life, at the age of sixteen, carrying on an affair with a much older man…during which outing he kissed you…and then told you he was being self -indulgent and that he should not allow himself to be alone with you?"

"Right."

"All right. Hm, this guy is a piece of work."

"Well, I should add that the movie was based on a book that I was reading a month ago, so that wasn't all him."

"Oh, the pair of you. How was the kissing?"

I think about how whenever he touches me I feel like an electric current is running through me. "It was extremely pleasant," I say, pursing my lips coyly.

"Gentle or rough?"

I widen my eyes a little at her question, but try to answer accurately. "Well, it wasn't overly rough, but I wouldn't call it gentle. It was sort of sudden." I'm getting all warm just thinking about it.

She's looking at me closely. "Mm hm. Tell me again, what you were saying about his needing to be in control of your interactions."

"Well, since he's the one saying I'm too young for him, et cetera, he's kind of driving everything, like how we're allowed to act towards each other. And it seemed like the last time I saw him, he kind of slipped up and told me more about how he felt than he meant to. And so I think that, he sort of said that, he wanted to see me alone to make sure things were OK between us. Like, I think he was worried about seeing me for the first time among other people, like maybe I would make a scene. So that's why we ended up going out together."

She nods, slowly. "I think that's part of it. There's obviously more to it, however. I get the feeling he is thinking about you a _lot, _and he is incredibly conflicted, but he is clearly attracted to you. And, this may sound odd, but he's a little scared of you."

"What? That's ridiculous. If anything, he wants me to be afraid of him."

"That's because he's afraid of you. Afraid of how you make him feel. He wants to control your feelings, or behavior, because he's not sure he can control his own." I stare at her. I wonder how much she gets paid per hour because this seems incisively perceptive. I haven't even told her about how Edward told me to "behave myself."

A slender young woman who looks like a blond version of mod Audrey Hepburn—high ponytail, black capris and ballet flats—like a stops by and offers us grilled shrimp on skewers. We each take some, and then I turn back and look at Alice expectantly.

"Well, since we are reading Freud's essays on sexuality, I must ask you, do you know anything about his relationship with his mother?"

I raise my eyebrows at her. "Not good. Apparently she left the family."

"Oh dear. When he was what age?"

I think back. "I am not sure, but I had the impression it was after he was ten years old."

"Mm. And do you have any knowledge of his relationships with other women, previous girlfriends?"

"Um, yes." This embarrasses me, for some reason. I haven't told her yet about the whole Tanya thing. "The big complaint seems to be that he won't let them get close."

"Well, he's bound to have a little weirdness around women, with that maternal history. I've had patients involved with men like that, and it can certainly be difficult if you can't manage your own expectations. I think you have to go into this as an experience you're giving _yourself, _an exploration of your own desires."

I sigh. "Well, I don't know if he'll go along with that, even. Tonight, he was over at my house, to play cards with my brother, and it was so awkward…he didn't think I was going to be there, I got the impression he wouldn't have come if he thought I was."

She nods, reflectively. "Well, it's not necessarily going to be a straight progression. How did he act towards you? Was he cold and distant?"

I think about this. Maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought. "Well, no. He was just surprised and careful. But it was such a change from the last time, when we were alone. There are these times when we're alone, and he's so _sweet_." I should probably fill her in on the Tanya situation, but for some reason I don't want to get into that. Maybe I'm afraid she'll tell me to give up on this mess.

Another cutely dressed server girl comes by with phyllo packets. Everyone in here is cutely dressed, including of course Alice, who is wearing a vintage-ey tailored sleeveless little black dress with a demure peter pan collar and some threatening-looking stiletto heels. I sigh, looking down at my usual uninspired jeans-and-black-sweater combo. "I need to do something about my wardrobe. Maybe I should get a part-time job. I need more spending money."

She raises an eyebrow at this. "Did you work in high school? You don't want to overextend yourself your first semester. How are things going in your regular classes?"

"Fine," I say, smiling to myself. _I can always get help with calculus, at least. Hm. Maybe I should start screwing up in that class. _"I worked part-time at a shop in high school. I'm used to juggling a lot of stuff." _That's an understatement._

"Well, let's not rush into anything but I may be able to help you in that respect. Remind me to introduce you to Laurent. I saw him here somewhere," she mutters to herself, scanning the room. "But, back to the issue at hand."

She glances at me almost shyly. "That fellow who opened the door at your house tonight…that wasn't him, was it?"

"Blond guy?"

"Yes."

"No, that's just Jasper. He's our housemate." She nods.

"How old is our guy?"

I debate whether to tell her. She prods. "Twenties? Thirties? Forties?"

_Oh, all right._ "Twenties." She seems satisfied with this. "And where's he from? He's not American, right?"

I stare at her. "How on earth did you know that?"

She brushes off my amazement. "Handwriting." _Oh. The envelope. _Still, I feel like I'm talking to Hercule Poirot.

"He's…Eastern European. Originally."

"Hm. I am not sure what to say about that. I have more experience with Western Europeans, personally. But in terms of his age, he's got plenty of time to sort himself out. Well, I must say, I like a man with a good dose of complication. I have to warn you, I don't have a very Anglo-Saxon attitude about sex. I spent my last two years of high school at a lycée in Paris. That was a formative experience. You would not believe the machinations that went on among the students and even some of the teachers. Everyone was sleeping with everyone, or trying to. It's really all considered a game there, without the tsk-tsking and tight-lipped seriousness we have about it here."

She sips her wine and regards the pregnant nude in front of us.

"He seems a little overly serious about it too, for someone not from here. Maybe you'd be good for him." She giggles at this, eying me. "So I say don't let up on him. I can tell by the way you behave that sleeping with him could be a fantastic experience for you, at least physically, even if it's a little complex emotionally. You seem like a rational girl, I think you can handle some complexity. I think it is wonderful if a girl your age can have an experienced lover who is really attuned to her physically, and I have high hopes for this fellow, if only based on the way you react to him."

She goes on. "The shirt" —I had told her about the shirt, not right away, but it sort of tumbled out, and she had had a few follow-up questions about it— "was an excellent move. You knew he liked seeing you in his shirt, he said it looked good on you. You liked the way it smelled like him, so you returned the favor. I suggest you keep looking for and finding ways to provoke him. You've already got his full attention. Now you have to demolish his defenses."

She smiles at me and I smile back. "Oh, and remind me—what did you say Jasper's last name was?"

- O – O – O – O - O -

When I get home I steel myself before opening the front door. It's a little after eleven, and I see Edward's car still parked outside, so they're probably all still here.

When I come into the kitchen I'm greeted with a rowdy chorus of "Bella!" from Emmett, Jasper, and Rosalie, as if I'm a long-lost daughter returned from the ends of the earth. There are a couple more friends of Emmett's that I remember from the barbecue, who are just leaving as I come in. My eyes flicker to Edward, who didn't join in the greeting and is looking at me poker-facedly, then away immediately as I take in the scene. The kitchen counters are littered with beer bottles and they've apparently moved on to gin and tonics, judging by the bottles on the table and the glasses in everyone's hands.

I start giggling.

"What?" asks Emmett.

"This is like my birthday party, in reverse."

This cracks Edward up, and makes Emmett smile sheepishly. Tanya looks at them questioningly and then glares at me. She obviously doesn't like to be on the outside of the joke.

Rosalie pipes up. "Speaking of which, Bella, I was just thinking about how we still need to take you out for a proper birthday celebration. Maybe this Saturday. I was thinking it would be fun if we went out dancing again, especially since"—glancing at Tanya—"it was cut short last time."

"Yes, and Edward didn't even show _up_ last time." Tanya slurs this complaint, glaring at Edward. She definitely sounds like she's three sheets to the wind.

"I did show up. I just missed you guys." He doesn't sound like he's been drinking as much as everyone else. His remark startles me, however. I hadn't quite realized that he had been there that night to meet us. I will have to try unraveling that after I go to bed tonight. I look at him again but he's not looking at me.

"Yes, well, you should definitely come along this time," says Rosalie. "You've got to see Bella dance. She's a really good dancer."

"I know." He is still studying his cards.

Tanya pounces on this. "You do? When have you seen her dance?" Even as tipsy as she seems, she's not missing much.

My eyes dart to him again, just as faint color stains his cheeks. He realizes he has just made a mistake.

Edward looks coolly at Tanya for a long moment. "I misspoke. I meant to say, I'm sure she is." He looks back down at his cards. I feel like he's avoiding looking at me.

Rosalie jumps in to break the tension. I am wondering if this has been going on all night, or just when I'm in the room. Can Tanya sense something, like a dog smells fear? Or is she just generally jealous? "Did you have fun this evening, Bella?"

"Yes." I go over to the fridge and find myself an Orangina. Maybe I should excuse myself and go to my room. Hanging out here seems like a bad idea.

"Who was that who came to pick you up?" asks Jasper.

"Alice Brandon. My tutor. Why do you ask?" I reply, smirking at him suggestively.

"No reason."

"She was asking about you."

He eyes me doubtfully, but can't hide his intrigue. Finally, he gives in. "Really?"

"I _think _it was you she was asking about," I say, teasingly. Jasper and I have developed an entertaining sibling-like relationship over the last couple of months. "She kept saying 'Blondie.' But you fit the description."

"Wench." Edward's head snaps up at this. He's looking hard at Jasper, who is smiling at me.

"No, really, she _was _asking about you. I think she thinks you're cute."

"So your _tutor_ talks to you about this kind of thing?"

"We talk about all kinds of things." I glance involuntarily at Edward, but he's looking down again.

"Ah, well, maybe I should ask her about _this,_ then," he says, reaching over to the kitchen counter behind him and grabbing the pad where we take phone messages. "There was a call for you—after 9 p.m., young lady— from someone calling himself Jacob?"

_Now _Edward is looking at me. Basically glaring at me. He clearly remembers that name.

"Jake? What'd he say?" I ask, calmly. I kind of like Edward's reaction. He appears not to like this one bit. I have a sudden feeling I've found my next form of provocation.

"He said…you can call back late, he's at the station working."

"Oo, what is he, a fireman?" asks Tanya, half-mocking, half-interested.

"He DJs," I tell her, offhandedly.

"He seemed _eager_ to speak with you," Jasper concludes, tearing off the sheet and handing it to me, or rather pretending to hand it to me and pulling it away when I reach my hand to take it from him.

"All right. And I'll just let _Miss Brandon_ know you think she's a troll." This elicits a snort from Tanya. Rosalie looks at her, concerned.

Jasper gives me the paper. I look at the clock. Everyone looks at the clock.

"All right, children, it's a school night." Rosalie stands up. "Tanya, how are we going to get you home?"

"Edward can take me."

Edward stands up. "I'll call you a cab," he answers, taking his phone out of his pocket and walking into the other room as he dials. I follow him out of the room and go down the hall towards my bedroom. When I glance back over my shoulder he's still glaring at me. I disappear into my room and shut the door. I am not sure I'm ready to call Jacob back tonight, but I am ready to let Edward think I am.


	15. Chapter 15

**I reworked and expanded chapter 14 so be sure to check that out if you read it right when it was posted!**

**I am very excited about all the rec's (and reviews!) this story is getting. My last one was so under the radar, it's a treat. Thank you!**

"That dress is amazing, Bella," Rosalie informs me for the third time. We are on the crowded dance floor getting jostled and sweaty.

"Thanks. De Laurentiis." I am getting good at my stock answer.

The dress _is _amazing. I silently thank Alice again for introducing me to Laurent. She'd finally spotted him again the other night at the gallery and waved him over towards us. As he had made his way across the room to us, she'd quickly explained that he was a dressmaker, with a _lovely_ little boutique, and he had mentioned to her that he needed a new girl to help in the shop.

"Alice, _ma puce._" He kissed her on each cheek, one, two, three times.

"Laurent, I'd like to introduce my student, Bella."

Laurent turned to me. He gazed intently at me with wide-set eyes and took my hand in two of his.

"Bella, I am enchanted." He had a musical voice and a charming accent. I gazed back at him, feeling slightly hypnotized. His skin was a rich chocolatey shade and he had tidy short dreadlocks, but his eyes were surprisingly pale brown, almost golden. "What beautiful skin you have." This was a somewhat weird remark coming from someone I was just meeting, but somehow, the way he said it, it didn't seem creepy, just more of an observation.

"Thank you. Um, you too." He threw his head back and laughed loudly at this.

Alice continued. "Laurent, I was wondering if you're still in need of help at the shop. Bella is looking for work…just part time, not so much as to distract her from her studies. I thought of you at once."

He turned to her and broke into a gleaming grin. "Alice, you know me so well."

Alice's laughter tinkled. "Of course I do, we are old friends."

Laurent pulled open a leather satchel he wore over one shoulder and across his chest. He took out a card and handed it to me.

"When are you available? Mornings, afternoons?"

"My classes are all in the morning, so afternoons are good."

"Can you come by my shop tomorrow at three? There is the address." He gestured to the card. I looked at it. It was made of creamy white, very thick card stock and said, simply, "De Laurentiis" and gave an address. I liked the font.

"All right. Thank you."

He smiled at me and looked at Alice. "You should come by sometime this week as well. I have some new things I think you'll like to see."

"Thanks, I will." She squeezed his hand and with a nod he moved away from us.

She leaned over to me. "So you know, he's probably be going to ask to shoot you for his catalog."

"What?"

"He's probably working on putting together the catalog for his spring collection right about now. You're exactly his type."

I must have looked concerned, because she added, "In a purely aesthetic way. Laurent is as gay as the day is long…but for his collateral he loves a girl like you. Ingenue, pretty, slim, long hair…"

"Are you kidding me? I'm not model material," I pshawed.

"Oh, you're perfect for Laurent. And it's low pressure, he's a lovely guy and his go-to photographer, Irina, is great, too. And it's a much better way to make a little spending money than working behind a counter, but if that's all you're game for I'm sure you can work that out. Anyway, you can decide. Go check out his shop. I adore his stuff."

"So you shop there?" I've been wondering where she shops.

"Well, I certainly wear his designs, but shop isn't the right word. We have more of a bartering arrangement. I'm very lucky to have a few friends who design clothing, and who often need new and original artworks for their spaces."

I had gone the following day to Laurent's shop, which was in a beautiful space in tony Madison Park, with a spare, nearly spartan aesthetic, golden wood floors and high ceilings, and simple racks suspended from the ceilings with narrow-gauge wires. There were some arresting framed photographs on the walls of what appeared to be a raging grassfire in the Hollywood Hills. And, just as Alice had predicted, he gave me a copy of his fall catalog and said he'd like to photograph me for the next one, if I would consider it. I told him I'd think about it, and after looking over the CV I had dutifully brought and asking me a few questions about my past working experience, he said he'd love to have me work in the shop two or three afternoons a week. As we were wrapping up he told me to please take a look around and I browsed through the racks of clothing. Most of the articles in the shop were very simple, made with beautiful materials in rich, interesting colors.

"I love your clothing," I told him, earnestly. "Everything in here is beautiful."

He beamed at me. "Thank you. I'll be glad to show you how the design process works. My workshop is in the back." He gestured to a large curtained doorway.

I was caressing the a shimmery silver fabric of a dress on a rack that seemed to be mostly evening wear. He crossed over to me and picked the hanger off the rack, holding up the dress. He looked me up and down and picked out the same dress in a different color.

"Now this would look stunning on you. That's another thing…I'd love to outfit you."

"Outfit me?"

"Yes. Viral marketing, you know. Do you have any fun parties or events coming up?"

"Well, we're going out dancing this weekend for my birthday."

"Perfect. Go try this on. You can wear it if you like."

"Really?" I asked him, dubiously. I was afraid to even look at the price tag.

"Of course. All I ask is that you tell people where it came from when they compliment you on it. And they _will_ compliment you." He offered the hanger to me and gestured to the curtained dressing rooms.

I looked at the dress. The dress was metallic bronze–colored silk, cut on the bias, with spaghetti straps. It was not terribly long, and it had two long silken cords that were attached at the waist area and draped over the hanger. Despite the edginess of the metallic color, it was more delicate and ethereal-looking than anything I'd ever worn.

"Try it on," he urged me. I ducked into the dressing room, put the dress on, and stuck my head out.

"I can't figure out these cords."

He waved me over to the mirror. "Hold your arms out of the way," he instructed. The cords were attached to the dress on the side seams, just below my breasts. He wound the cords around my waist, crisscrossing them a couple of times in the front and the back, cinching the silk close to my waist in a sort of Grecian effect. He tied them through a loop on one side, near my hip, letting the ends dangle slightly past the hem of the dress, which was mid thigh. Then stood back and surveyed me in the mirror. The dress was gorgeous.

"The bronze makes your skin look like fresh cream, and it brings out the red highlights in your hair. And you have just the right figure for this dress, you have to be a nymphet to pull it off this well." I glanced at him, but he kept looking at the dress in the mirror and nodding, seeming well satisfied.

"All right. The shoes. Do you have any strappy sandals?" I shook my head. "You're not going to be able to find many at this time of year. Let me see what I have in back. What size are you?"

I told him and he disappeared behind the curtain, rummaged around, and emerged with two pairs of sandals, one flat, the other with a spike heel.

"I'm sorry, I don't think I can wear those," I said, pointing to the heels.

"Don't apologize. Let's try these on." I sat down on a little bench near the mirror and he put the gladiator sandals on me, wrapping the straps a ways up my ankles.

We checked it out in the mirror again.

"I think no heels is fine for you. You are not short, and your limbs are long, which gives you the illusion of height." He smiled at me in the mirror. "Beautiful. Wear it for your evening out."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, absolutely. Send everyone my way who comments on it."

"Erm…can I just ask…" I could feel myself blushing. I gestured to my chest. "How do I wear a bra?" I had stripped down to my panties to try it on, but I felt rather naked up top.

"Why do you need one?" He asked, sounding confused and examining my breasts in the mirror.

"Well, in case I get cold, you know."

"Oh, you Americans. Why do you insist on hiding your nipples? In France, we consider that sexy, to see a woman's nipple underneath her clothing. It's natural."

"Well, around here, I would just look like…I would just look like…a floozy." I started giggling at my own word choice. Seriously, though, this dress was way shorter and flimsier than anything I was accustomed to wearing.

Laurent rolled his eyes. "All right, all right. You could wear a strapless demibra. Or, some…pasties. What do you call them…the adhesive ones," he said dismissively, waving his hands around.

"All right." I ducked back into the dressing room and changed back. After a bit more arrangement-making and thanking on my part, I headed home, dress in hand.

- O - O - O - O -

And now it was Saturday night, and we were at a club—a different one from that first night. This one was in Pioneer Square, in an old brick building that had started life as a vinegar factory and later done service as a speakeasy. It had an interesting layout with a couple of different dance floors with different styles of music, meandering hallways, chill rooms, nooks and crannies.

Rosalie and I were on the main dance floor, while Emmett and Jazz were sitting at a table, sipping their drinks. Edward hadn't turned up yet, so I was keeping one distracted eye on the table while enjoying the scene with Rosalie. I was in an unusually festive mood, brought on probably by the warm sake I had drunk at dinner and the absence of Tanya. I had come out of my room on Tuesday night, after everyone left, and on my way to the bathroom overheard Emmett and Rose nearly quarreling about it: apparently Edward complained to Emmett on his way out the door about Tanya's presence at guys' night, and Emmett was questioning Rose about why she had invited Tanya over. Rosalie said Tanya sort of invited herself, she heard they were playing poker and she just came, and Rosalie had just gone along with her. Then Rosalie said that Tanya had drunk-dialed Edward a few nights previous and gotten into it with him over the phone, and she felt bad afterwards, had wanted to sort of clear the air.

"Well, that didn't really work out so well, did it," I heard Emmett say. "No wonder he's so annoyed."

A pause. "No, she really shouldn't drink around him right now."

"Yeah, and maybe it would be better if she took a break, didn't show up on Saturday, it wouldn't be nice for Bella if her night out turned into a scene."

Rose's response was noncommittal, but a couple of days later she mentioned to me that, as it turned out, something had come up and Tanya had decided she couldn't join us on Saturday. Rosalie seemed concerned that I would be bothered by Tanya's absence, or by having fewer people out with us that night, but I assured her that it was fine.

Emmett had invited our parents up to Seattle for dinner, and they had all taken me out for sushi—that is, for a family dinner. Emmett and Rosalie had come, as had Jacob—he had been calling me earlier in the week, it turned out, because he was coming up to Seattle for his UW school tour. I had invited him to come out with us that night, as an experiment in stirring the pot, but as it turned out he had a chance to go sit in for a late-night broadcast at KEXP, so he turned the dancing part down and came along for dinner. The others were not coming to dinner, so this sort of defeated the purpose, but Jacob has always known my family so it was a pretty comfortable, pleasant time. I had been wearing my long black cardigan all through dinner trying to downplay my dress, and I had nearly frozen my ass off getting from the cab into the nightclub, but it was worth it to see Emmett's eyes bug out when I took my sweater off.

"Jeez Louise, Bella, look at you." I smiled coyly at him and stuck my hands on my hips, jutting one hip out at him. He shook his head, but he was smiling.

"Looks like our young Bella is all grown up," said Rosalie, taking my arm and dragging me out on the floor.

And now I'm taking her arm and dragging her back off the floor because I see Edward has turned up. "I'm thirsty," I say in response to her quizzical look. He's standing at the table talking to Em and Jazz, leaning against a railing just behind the table. As we near them he looks me up and down and then looks back attentively at Emmett, who seems to be filling him in on something. Rosalie, who's had a couple, finally notices Edward and exclaims,

"Look! Edward's here," and walks over to give him an enthusiastic hug, which makes him grin. He meets my eyes over her shoulder.

"Hey," he says. I take advantage of Rosalie's lead to give him a hug as well, sliding my arms under his and around his back and pressing against him. He seems cautious, and doesn't pull me close, but he bends his head down and brushes his cheek against mine briefly. He smells good.

"You look pretty," he says, quietly, as I release him. He glances around. "Where's your friend?" He seems on edge.

"He had something else to go to tonight."

Emmett must have mentioned to him who all was coming to dinner. I wonder if he had asked about it. Maybe I'll get some mileage out of Jacob anyway, even if I can't flirt with him or dance with him in front of Edward or whatever it was I had been planning to work up the balls to do.

He turns back to the others. "Anyone need a refill?"

I sit down at the table. "I'll have a lemon drop," I smirk at him. He bites the insides of both cheeks.

"I'm not contributing to the delinquency of a minor," he says coolly.

"Spoilsport."

"Delinquent."

"Children," says Rosalie. "I'll have two lemon drops, Edward."

"Double-fisting, are we?" Jasper asks.

"Rosalie," Emmett says in a warning tone. Rosalie rolls her eyes. "OK, how about we share one. Make it a double."

Edward rolls his eyes and stalks off. He comes back a few minutes later with a lemon drop and an extra sugar-rimmed glass, which he sets on the table, and something in a rocks glass for himself. I pick up the empty glass and clink theirs, and Rosalie laughs and pours a splash of her cocktail into my glass. The guys start hashing out a football game played earlier in the day, Rosalie and I look at each other, and then the music changes to the opening beats of Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In the Heart." I stand up and down what's left of my little lemon drop. "'Scuse us, we have to go dance to this." Rosalie's right with me and next thing you know we're out on the floor, shaking our moneymakers and bumping hips.

"But none of your lesbian bullshit, now, Rosalie," I tell her, remembering the last time we were out dancing and she and Tanya were all over each other. She shrieks with laughter.

"I better get Emmett out here, then," she shouts in my ear. She catches his attention and waves him out. This song is pretty irresistible, I'm surprised they're not both out here, but Jasper in busy prattling away, presumably about them Dawgs, in Edward's ear. Edward's watching us, and every time I look over at them, he's watching us. I wave my hand towards us, but he shakes his head slightly. The song shifts to that one that samples from a Jane Fonda workout tape, and then it's Prince's "Erotic City." Rosalie and Emmett are kind of getting all over each other, so I move away from them on the floor and moments later notice someone behind me, dancing insistently close. I glance up. It's a stranger, a dark-haired guy in his early twenties. He smiles at me.

Maybe it's the dress, maybe it's the song, maybe it's my sheer frustration, maybe it's the idea I had been brewing about dancing with Jacob in front of Edward…but instead of moving away I stay put and keep dancing. Encouraged, the guy presses up closer behind me, gently pushing his hips into my backside. I'm moving my hips and the silk is sliding easily against him. I glance over at Edward. Jasper is now leaning over and chatting up some girls at the next table, and Edward is glaring darkly at me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as if he's about to spring. The guy slips his hands around my waist and leans down to whisper, "I like the way you move." I smile up at him, and then glance back towards Edward. His chair is empty. I move away from the guy a bit, turning around to dance with him in a less intimate way, and when the song comes to a close I tell him I have to hit the ladies' and I get off the dance floor, not in the direction of the table. I fell flustered and need to walk around or drink some water. As I move out of the crowd of dancers, I feel a hand grasp my upper arm. It's Edward.

"I need to talk to you." He steers me away, past the bar, past the coatroom, down one of the rat-maze hallways.

"Where are we going?" I ask him.

"Somewhere private." He suddenly stops. To one side of us there's a sort of alcove, then a couple of stairs leading up to a blind doorway that led somewhere once but has been filled in with bricks. He pushes me into the dark alcove, up against the wall, and suddenly his mouth is on mine, his warm lips hungrily exploring mine. He is leaning in, his hands on either side of my head, but as I respond with undisguised enthusiasm, purring and panting and opening my mouth to his tongue, he slides both arms around me and crushes me against him, pulling me away from the wall and bending me slightly backwards. When I pull away to gasp for air he continues kissing down along my throat, sending shivers of pleasure shooting through me, but just as he reaches the tops of my breasts he travels back up to growl in my ear,

"I don't ever want to see you with another man's hands on you."

I'm swooning for him. "Then let me be with you," I whisper.

He groans and tilts his head back down, kissing my neck, nipping at it, finally, _finally_ pushing himself against me so I can feel how excited he is. I am swollen with desire for him, but he is too tall, I need to feel his cock not against my belly but against the center of me, so I pull him towards the stairs and take a step up. I slide my arms under his and pull his towards me, sliding my hands over the taut muscles of his back. His hands are on my ribs, then sliding down my sides and hips and finally he grabs my ass and presses my hips against his, grinding his hard-on into me just exactly where I want it. His head is bent into the crook of my neck and his breath sounds ragged and feels hot on my shoulder. He starts kissing my shoulder, then sucking on it lightly, and he's rhythmically thrusting his cock against me, and it feels enormous, and I start to worry that I'm going to have a spot on the front of my dress from my own wetness. I slide one leg up over his hip and his hand is immediately under my skirt, wandering up the back of my thigh and caressing my ass under my dress.

I can't take it any more. "Are you going to fuck me?" I whisper. I've never been so crude, Jacob and I never really talked dirty or anything like that, but I've also never been turned on to this degree.

He stops moving. "Do you want me to?" he asks, haltingly. His gaze is so intense I want to look away, but I force myself to hold his eyes. I reach under my skirt and take his hand and bring it between my legs, pushing my panties aside to let him feel how wet I am.

"Jesus," he mutters, stroking me gently from front to back with one finger, then two, then curling his fingers inside. "Jesus."

He pulls his hand away. "You're making this so hard for me, Bella. Can't you understand, I'm trying to be decent."

"I don't want you to be decent. I want you to be indecent. With me. I want you to be indecent with me." I tug on the bottom of his short-sleeve shirt, and one of the buttons comes undone. I slide my hands under his shirt, exploring his belly, his waist. I feel his muscles tense under my fingers.

He suddenly grasps my panties and yanks them down, then kneels as he pulls them down to my ankles and helps me step out of them. He stuffs them in his left-hand back pocket as he stands back up, sliding one hand under my dress and cupping my ass again, and the other goes to his right-hand back pocket. He pauses, then looks stricken.

"I don't have anything," he whispers. It takes a moment for my fevered brain to register that he's talking about a condom.

My thoughts race. My period ended two days ago. It lasted four days. Day six. That's eight days to day fourteen.

"I'm safe," I whisper. He looks at me gravely and I can see his brain register something, and although I also know it's registering something different from what I am talking about, I say nothing. I want this too badly.

And then his lips are on mine again, and he's undoing his pants and pulling them down just enough, and I feel the smooth, warm head of his cock pushing against my opening, and he hitches my leg up as he guides himself inside. He thrusts and slowly pulls out and thrusts again and with the third thrust he's all the way inside. He's filling me and stretching me in the best possible way and I feel like I'm going to explode as soon as he starts moving. He's holding himself still, fully sheathed inside me, one hand on my ass and the other woven into my hair at the back of my neck, as if he's just savoring the experience of being inside me, totally naked, and I'm so excited I can't help but undulate my hips, caressing him.

"You feel amazing," he whispers. "Is this all right?"

"I think I'm going to come," I whisper back. He smiles at this, showing me those fucking eyeteeth of his, and I've never seen anything sexier. Suddenly he puts his other hand under my ass and hoists me up, leaning me against the wall, and he starts driving into me.

"Yes, you are," he says, sliding so deeply into me and pulling nearly all the way back out, and I can feel a tidal wave of pleasure building, and as if he senses this he starts stroking more quickly and shallowly, and the way he is holding me has my clit right against the base of his cock and I can't believe I am getting so well fucked up against the wall in a public place by the man I've been desperately lusting after for two months and fuck, I love how he feels inside me and I'm acting like a complete slut for him, and fuck yes, he's going to come inside me, imminently, because I'm letting him, because I want everything from him, and oh! I explode in the most intense orgasm I've ever experienced, bar none, and the waves of pleasure only intensify when he thrusts into me even harder and then holds himself still as his cock throbs inside me and I know he's coming. I sort of realize as the pangs of pleasure die away that we've both been making a lot of noise, which dissolves into laughing as Edward relaxes slightly, leaning me more against the wall and taking a quick look behind him to make sure there's not an audience. He leans in and kisses my breast.

"Sweet Bella."

After a minute he slides out of me and lets me back down onto the step. He smiles at me sheepishly as he tucks himself back into his pants and fastens them back up. I smooth my dress down and smooth my hair. He leans in and kisses my mouth again, and then whispers in my ear,

"I'm going to want to have you again later tonight but right now we'd better get back before they start looking for us."

My knees are weak at the bit about wanting to have me again but before I can wonder how he's going to manage that I realize we had better get back.

He stands back to let me pass in front of him. "Go back to the table. I'll be back in a few minutes." We walk part of the way down the hall together, then he squeezes my hand and heads off in a different direction. I walk back to the table, but just as I get there, I realize I have a problem. I've never had sex without a condom before, and although I vaguely knew it was "messy," I find that Edward's um, cum, is leaking down my thigh and I can't sit down at the table because I definitely _will_ have a big wet spot on my dress. _Crap. What do I do now?_

"Hi guys," I call out, coming to stand awkwardly next to the table, hands on the back of a chair. I cross my legs. "Wassup."

"Hey, we were wondering where you were."

"Ladies' room. The line was enormous. Where's Edward?" I wince slightly. _Too obvious?_ No one else seems to react.

"He seemed like he was in a foul mood," says Jasper. I see the top of Edward's head, a little above the crowd, wending towards us. _I need to intercept him. I need my underwear, now._

"Hey, uh, I'll be right back."

"Where are you going?" Emmett calls after me.

"Ladies'. Drink is going right through me." I call back. I walk quickly to meet Edward as far away from the table as possible.

"What is it?" he asks, looking worried. He's carrying bottles of water.

"I need my panties," I hiss.

He grins, turning around so I can fish them out of his pocket. "What, don't I get a souvenir?"

"Shut up, you cad." I can't help grinning back at him.

I turn on my heel and flounce off towards the bathroom.

**A/N: Oh Bella, you dirty birdie**


	16. Chapter 16

Clutching my balled-up panties, I head into a bathroom stall and clean myself up, and then carefully put them back on, over my sandals. I come out and take a look in the mirror. It's a good thing it's dark in the club, I think, because I look suspiciously bright-eyed and flushed and my hair is a mess. I use my fingers to try to comb it and smooth it some more, and as I sweep it back over my shoulder I discover an angry red bruise on my shoulder. _Oh no. He's left a mark._

There are a few other girls clustered around the mirrors fixing their makeup, one with a black mesh makeup bag.

"'Scuse me," I say, apologetically. "Do you have any concealer I can borrow?"

She eyes me dubiously, but when I glance at my shoulder and she notices the hickey, she starts smiling and digs out her concealer.

"Here," she says, handing me the tube. I smear makeup over the bruise, concealing it somewhat, and hand it back to her. I feel like the whole group of girls is watching.

"Thanks."

"No problem."

A tall brunette standing behind me says, "That's a beautiful dress. Where's it from?"

"De Laurentiis. In Madison Park, do you know where it is?"

"No, where?"

I tell her the cross streets.

"It's very original."

"Thanks. But careful, you see the sort of thing that might happen, wearing a dress like this," I crack, shrugging my shoulder at her. "I'm almost afraid to go back out there." That makes a couple of them giggle. I'm earning my keep.

I take a deep breath, push open the bathroom door, and head back to the table. I feel like I'm walking into a test. I slide into the only empty seat, which is next to Rosalie and across from Edward. Everyone's apparently done dancing, just sitting around and chatting. I glance over at Edward a couple of times, but he's not looking at me, he's listening to the talk and smiling like a sphinx. The third time I look, he's looking at me, so I glance away quickly. I can't help smiling too. Hang on, I'm smiling at Jasper. He gives me a friendly grin. I grab a bottle of water from the table to cover my confusion.

Edward puts his hands behind his head and stretches, arching his back like a cat. He leans in and addresses the table. "How did you guys get here?" he asks.

"We cabbed it," Emmett tells him. Emmett is always especially cautious when Dad is around, like earlier tonight, and there is any wee bit of drinking.

"I got a lift from Riley," adds Jasper. He had been out to dinner with friends.

"If you all want to take off now, I can give you a ride." I look at him again. I'm thinking about what he said earlier, about having me later, and obviously he has something up his sleeve.

The offer of a ride is enough of an inducement to get everyone to leave. We get our coats from the cloakroom and walk a couple of dark drizzly blocks to where Edward has parked his Volvo—me freezing my ass off again to the point where my teeth are chattering and Emmett is laughing at me and advising me that I should wear long johns next time—and we all pile in. I'm in the back between Rosalie and Jasper.

When we reach the house, Edward parks in front, cuts the engine, and asks Emmett if he can have a couple of Advil because his head aches. He follows us inside and Emmett fetches him the pills and asks me to bring some water, and Edward installs himself on the couch. So I go into the kitchen and fill a glass, check to make sure my hair is covering the hickey on my shoulder, and as I bring the glass into the front room Emmett is telling Edward sure, he can crash on the couch, and he goes to find extra blankets and pillows in the hall closet. I set the glass on the coffee table in front of Edward, without looking at him, but he makes me look at him by thanking me. I smile at him and can feel myself going all pink in the cheeks, not to mention trembly in the fingers, because I know what he is up to, so I decide the safest course is for me to beat a swift retreat.

I announce my exhaustion and go lock myself in the bathroom, where I try to calm myself down by washing my face, only to work myself back up into a state of butterflies when I decide I'd better strip down and wash under my arms and between my legs as well. I notice I smell different. I wonder if he's going to like that. Then I slip into my robe and down the hall—when I come out of the bathroom I can hear Jasper offering the bathroom to Edward to go wash up first and Edward telling Jasper no, you go ahead—Emmett and Rosalie must already be in Emmett's room, which has its own bathroom—and I go into my room to rifle through my drawers and agonize about what on earth to put on. My normal bedtime attire is a battered, threadbare extra-large t-shirt, or sometimes a camisole and boy shorts, but nothing seems right so finally I decide with a smile to just go bare. I put out the light and slide under the covers and lie there waiting for the cold sheets to warm up, feeling a delicious, terrifying sense of anticipation.

The "terrifying" part is completely new to me. I never felt even remotely so agitated with Jacob. Sure, we were high school kids sneaking around behind our parents' backs, but there wasn't this forbidden quality to our relationship that so defines my connection with Edward. I'm also lying here naked, which is an unfamiliar sensation—although I like the luxuriousness of feeling the sheets against my skin, chilly though they are—and this surface vulnerability echoes that deeper vulnerability that I've allowed myself tonight and that I'm on the verge of allowing myself again. _What am I doing? _I feel like a quivering bride of some other time waiting for her husband, not quite knowing what to expect, or a woman of some earlier age waiting for her lover, knowing she might ruin herself but unable to resist. I count the days again, still coming up with six, and though I have not charted myself since the last school year ended, I know myself. I wasn't exactly _lying _to Edward, I feel safe. And yet I relish this sheer, physical desire tinged with a sense of risk that was totally absent with Jacob. I would never for a moment have _considered _doing this with Jacob, and I think, again—as I was thinking this summer, while reading _Tess _and longing for Edward_,_ that I live in a time when my experience of lovemaking is divorced from that of womankind for all of human history, at least in the place where I was born. The essential danger of it has been effectively removed, the reason why it was, for millennia, so impossible to have sex outside of the security of marriage…and those that did risk it, the extreme desire that must have driven them, heightened sensation they must have felt, to risk _everything, _their health and reputation and future prospects and place in the world, to come together with a man. It is foolish but I want to feel that kind of reality, and the _lust _I feel for Edward is so elemental and pure that it deserves to be given full expression. _Just for one night. Tomorrow I'll be good._

Doors close, water runs, and gradually the house darkens, quiet, settles. Finally I hear a light scratching at my door. I prop myself up on my elbows. The door opens and Edward leans his head in, sees me looking at him, and slides into the room, turning to close the door silently behind him. He's shirtless, wearing pajama bottoms Emmett must have given him. A shiver of pleasure races through me at the sight of him. I sit up, holding the sheet over my breasts. He comes over and sits on edge of the bed, facing me.

"Can I come in?" I'm not sure if he's talking about my room, my bed, or something else. I decide he means my bed.

"Yes," I smile, leaning back onto the pillows. I lift up a corner of the sheets.

He looks intently at me as he takes the blanket and slips underneath. His hand finds and caresses my naked waist and immediately travels down over my bottom.

"Are you having trouble keeping your panties on, Bella?" he whispers in my ear. I was already tingling with anticipation from lying here waiting for him, but now I'm throbbing.

"Yes," I whisper, unable to think of anything clever to say.

"Mm," he responds, pressing his lips against mine. He's propping himself on one elbow and leaning over me as he kisses me slow and deep. His hand is back at my waist, stroking my hip, ghosting over my belly. He's teasing me, coyly avoiding where my body is moving almost of its own accord to bring him, and I can't stop my fingertips from roaming all over his chest and belly, exploring the hair there. Being lightish colored it didn't look as heavy as it feels in the dark. Jacob had been nearly hairless, and I knew through many slumber party discussions that Jessica and Lauren both liked that look, but I love the maleness of this. _He's not a boy, he's a man, _I think. The thought makes me ache for him, and I finger the waistband of his pajamas as our tongues thrust and parry, not quite daring to push them down.

Finally he wraps both arms around me and slides down, kissing and licking my breasts and finally suckling them, first one and then the other, slowly and deliberately working me up into a writhing, mewling mess. He slides a little further down, kissing my belly, but just when I think he's going to go farther down, he slides himself back up and props himself back up on one elbow, regarding me with a smile. He slides his hand between my legs and cups me, covering me with his warm palm.

"You're beautiful," he whispers, letting his fingers slide into my slippery wetness. Only when his fingers slide along my folds do I feel how wet I am down there. Involuntarily, I spread my knees; he is playing me like an instrument. I push my hips up, but he's teasing me and I can't get purchase.

I can't wait any more, and it's not his hand I want down there. I push him onto his back and swing my leg over him, propping myself up on both arms so that our hips are our only point of contact and frotting myself against his rigid cock, which is still separated from me by thin cotton fabric.

"Wait," he pants, reaching down to yank down the jammie bottoms. I smile and immediately start sliding myself against him, smearing him with my wetness and teasing him, sliding myself onto his tip and then pulling back to rub my clit against it. He plays along with this for a few minutes and then, as I'm teasing his tip, he suddenly thrusts upward, coming deeper inside me.

"Uh-uh," I tease, laughing, pulling up and away. He grins and relaxes, but he puts his hands on my hips, and the next time I bring his tip inside, he takes charge, thrusting up with his hips and pushing down with his hands, and then thrusting a couple more times to come all the way inside. I moan appreciatively and slowly move my hips to fit him deeper.

"Sit up," he whispers.

I pull my knees forward so that I am sitting astride him, which brings him still deeper. I feel exposed in this position, and my hands go automatically to cover my breasts.

"No," he says, pulling my hands away and placing them on his chest. "I want to see you."

I smile at him and, unable to stay still, I start to slowly undulate my hips as he thrusts up gently to meet me, and soon his thrusts are growing stronger and he puts his hands on my hips again to pull me against him. I can feel my own pleasure building as we rock together and I close my eyes, focusing on the hardness of him and the strength of his movements. He slides one hand up my back and pulls me a little towards him, and the shift puts pressure just where I want it and I start moaning softly, trying to keep it down but also let him know how close I am.

"Say my name."

"Edward," I pant.

"Again," he growls. He presses on the small of my back, pulling me a little more forward as he thrusts into me, strong and deep and a little faster now.

"Ungh." I'm on the verge.

"Say it," he growls, sharply. It sends me over the edge.

"Edward," I cry out, then clap a hand over my mouth as pleasure overtakes me. I ride it out, trying not to moan too loudly, and the next thing I know I'm on my back and he's driving into me, absolutely pistoning, which is bringing me back up to a peak of excitement and then he makes a strangled cry and holds himself still for a moment before thrusting strongly just a couple of times, and I am so turned on by his pleasure that I find I'm coming again.

"Dear god," he mutters, when it's all over and he pulls out and flops himself face up on the bed next to me. He's panting. We lie there quietly for a little while, until our breathing evens out.

"So what happens tomorrow," I ask him.

"Well," he whispers, rolling over on his side to prop his head on his hand. "We go make a full and prompt confession to Emmett."

I jerk my head to look at him, trying to glean from his expression in the darkness whether he's joking. I can't read his face.

"Um…" I demur. I can't even contemplate fessing up to Emmett. I don't want to imagine the crazy shitstorm that would ensue.

He breaks into a grin. "Just checking."

I slap him lightly on the chest. He grabs my hand, brings it down to rest on the sheet between us, then slides his fingers down to encircle my wrist.

"What if I _did _want to confess?" I ask him, teasingly. "What would you do?"

"Mm." He's looking at me very directly as he takes my wrist and pins it over my head against the pillow. He's hovering over me now. He takes my other wrist and pins it above my head as well. He brushes his lips against mine, but when I lift my chin to kiss him, he pulls back. He puts his lips close to my ear.

"You can do whatever you like, but if you confess, I don't think I'll be able to sneak into your bed like this again."

He kisses me just below my ear, which sends a new cascade of tingles down my spine. "It seems you've got me over a barrel," I whisper.

He pauses. "I like that image," he chuckles.

I ignore this. "I say, what Emmett doesn't know won't hurt him. I don't want him to get all sore."

"No. But…I do kind of want to make _you_ all sore." He pushes his hips against my leg; he's hard again.

"You've got to be kidding me," I tell him.

"I didn't think this was going to happen," he shrugs. "I want to make the most of it." My thoughts have been traveling along similar lines, wondering if this is my chance, and he's going to vanish when this night is over. Based on his past behavior I am very worried he's going to start regretting it, keeping his distance.

I kiss him and spread my legs, and he's inside me again. No difficulty there—I'm still all sloppy from our last round, and my whole body still feels on alert just because of his presence, despite how satisfied he made me. I may be sore tomorrow, but I can't get enough of him right now.

He sets a leisurely pace, making long, slow strokes. His cock feels very hard, considering how recently he came. I feel flattered by how into this he seems. I smooth my hands down his back, then down over his ass, feeling him move as he pushes inside me. I use my hands to push him deeper.

"So you don't regret this?" I whisper.

He stops moving. "I should. For your sake. But I don't." He's sounding like Cassandra again. _"I'm not good for you." "You don't know what you're getting into."_

He starts moving inside me again, slowly. "I regret wasting all that time. After what I'm experiencing tonight, I think I'm not going to be able to stay away from you."

I'm starting to lose my mind, this feels so good. I don't want it to stop, ever.

"I'm breaking a rule of mine, though," he whispers.

"Which rule?" I sass him. "The one about not fucking your good friend's little sister?" I roll my hips as say this, pushing up to bury him inside me, then stroking him as I pull away.

"No…" he answers, pulling nearly all the way out and then sliding deep while he slowly and deliberately kisses my neck. "It's that I like you. Usually I don't fuck girls I like."

_Oh boy, Tanya. _I'm not sure how to process this.

"And, as a corollary," he whispers, "I've never fucked anyone without a condom. You feel so good…so fucking wet for me."

Ach, I'm going to hell. I know he thinks I'm on the pill. I'm going to have to sort this out, somehow, but the things he's whispering to me and his dirty mouth and the way he's moving his hips have got me on the edge, again. For my part, I've never been able to come like this, without a little direct manual help, but now Edward's got me on the brink a third time so I know it's not a fluke. I'm not sure if it's the sheer naughtiness of the situation or something about him physically or the chemistry between us, but whatever it is, he has my number.

"This is so bad. You're going to make me come again."

He pushes into me a little quicker and harder. "Oh yeah?" He sounds smug.

"Yes. Yes. Just like that," I whisper. He quickens his pace, thrusting a little harder, again and again.

"You like being bad."

"Yes."

# # #

When I wake up the next morning, very early, the other side of the bed is empty. He's gone. I sigh, knowing it's best, but wishing him back. I roll onto the side of the bed he had been sleeping on, and when I do, I hear the crinkling of paper. I lift my head and find a note left on the pillow.

I flick on the bedside light to read it. It's written in all caps…_hm._

"See you at breakfast. Try to act normal. X"


	17. Chapter 17

I fold up the note, thinking where to put it where it will be safe from Emmett's prying eyes. Not that I think he snoops through my stuff, but since that looking-for-a-pen-in-the-backpack incident I know I need to be careful. My eyes fall on my bedside drawer, but that seems unsafe. Probably my dresser, where I've hidden Edward's other note, is better.

But before I get up, old habit surges up and makes me open my bedside drawer. I feel around but there is no thermometer. I haven't taken my waking temperature since June, and when I moved here to Emmett's the thermometer probably wound up in the bathroom medicine cabinet.

But my little black calendar is there in the drawer. I still note with a "1" in the bottom right-hand corner of the square of the day when my period begins, as I always have, and use this notation to mark days 7, 14, 21, and 28, which is usually followed by a gap of two days before the next "1."

I flip back to June, then page back through the months of last school year. Every day is notated with at least two numbers—the day of my cycle, plus my waking temperature, which I noted in Celsius, just to throw my mom off the scent in case she ever looked in this calendar—as well as the lunar phase. Some days have other notations, and day 14 or 15 always have an "O" disguised as a null sign, again for the benefit of prying eyes.

It sort of started with Jacob. No, before that, it started with physics class. OK, actually, the origins of this go back to when I was just a kid. My mom had a couple of family medical encyclopedias on the den shelf, which I spent hours poring over when I was nine or ten. I loved to read about chicken pox and night terrors and compound fractures, styes and the removal of ticks and tuberculosis. From there I moved on to a little volume she had on Chinese medicine, which I found weirdly unreliable with all its talk of compass directions and humors, but still interesting, and a big tome on nutrition that had been a college textbook of hers. One day in her bedroom, when I was twelve, I was looking on her shelf for something entertaining in the realm of pop psychology or love relationships—she had a few of those—I came across two books on natural family planning, one slim one with a sticker on the back noting its origin as the Catholic bookstore downtown, and another thick one that didn't appear to come from there, judging by its feminist tone and its entire chapter on avoiding getting pregnant. In the back there was a series of tear-out charts for tracking "symptoms" like waking temperature and position of the cervix. I spent some time digesting those two books, and then put them back where I found them. A couple years later, when I started getting my period, I made it a habit to note down the days of my cycle, mainly because in the sixth grade the rumor spread like wildfire through school that the Spanish teacher, Señora Mendoza, a lay teacher who was in the habit of wearing pants, had been caught off guard by her period and bled all over her white capris right in class. I have no idea if this was true or simply some deranged adolescent fantasy brought on by the provocation of plump Señora Mendoza's snug white capris, but for a couple of years I lived in terror of having an "accident" and never wanted to be surprised.

The books came back into my mind at the beginning of my junior year. I was working a year ahead in science and so I was taking physics that year, and one of the first segments was astronomy. One of our assignments was to go out every night at sunset in September and sketch the position of the moon on the horizon as it rose or set, as well as its shape, to help us understand how the phases and position of the moon reflect its position in its orbit in relation to the sun and earth. My imagination was caught by this assignment, and I puzzled over the moon's 28-day cycle I began to wonder whether it was just a coincidence that my own cycle was almost the same length. It seemed to me there must be a connection, and I took that thicker book back off my mom's shelf and started tracking my own cycle more carefully, following the instructions to examine myself to figure out when I was ovulating and noting _that_ down, along with the onset of my period, in my little calendar, then adding in the phases of the moon. In a few months I would have enough data to see whether my own cycle, at least, was coordinated with the moon's.

At some point in the winter semester, I had tried to get Angela and Jessica to start tracking themselves, thinking that if I worked up to enough of a sample size I could have some potentially interesting science fair material. They both took some convincing, especially Jessica, who thought the whole endeavor kind of weird and creepy, even though I wasn't even trying to get her to check the consistency of her cervical mucus (any mention of which probably would have resulting in shrieking and open-hand slapping on the arm), only write down the days of her cycle.

This was about the time that I started fooling around with Jacob, and when we started having sex I had a reason to become even more diligent. In our Human Sexuality class in ninth grade we had been informed about the failure rates of each type of contraception, and as a result I was suspicious of condoms (typical use, 15 percent). I started taking my waking temperature every morning, noting down my other physical symptoms, and before long it was second nature to me. Day 1, first red blood. Day 1–4, I have my period. Day 5–6, dry and safe. Day 7–8, dry and fairly safe, depending on which estimates of the maximum life span of sperm you believed. I researched this quite a bit and generally found 5, but occasionally read 7. Days 9–13, increasingly dangerous since sperm can hang out for a few days, waiting for an egg. Day 14 or 15, my usual day of ovulation. Give it a day or two after the temperature rise, and I knew I was safe again through at least day 6.

OK. Right about now, you're saying, this girl is a nut case. But that's how I am. If I'm curious about or interested in something I can be diligent. Thorough. Exhaustive. Obsessive? As they say: Like, whatever. It's gotten me into college a year early, so…

Of course, my excessive diligence back then had been born of an excess of caution. We were using condoms every time. I just wanted to gain a sense of which days were safe and which days weren't, as a sort of back-up, so that I could say "no" on days when a broken condom would likely spell disaster, or at least a few weeks of stress. Now, as I lie in my bed, clutching Edward's folded-up note in my hand and wishing I had a thermometer so I could have a data point for today, I have to laugh at how ridiculously inconsistent my behavior is. The ironic thing is that it was my surplus of caution that has, in a weird way, gotten me here, to a point of knowing myself so well, knowing that for me, with my long cycle, regular as clockwork, and my nine months of data, day 6 was, from a rational standpoint, a safe day. The self-knowledge I had gained, driven by a need for security, was now allowing me to take a risk I would never have taken before.

Anyway, Jessica and Angela humored me for a few months, but then given up, Jessica explaining to me that this was just the type of behavior that would make me a total social outcast if I didn't happen to be friends with her and Lauren. Which, I had suspected ever since my arrival at public school at the start of ninth grade, would never have happened at all, except they thought I was rather pretty and wanted to keep their friends close and their competition closer. I did get asked out immediately that year by James, a senior who was on the lacrosse team and popular, but I ended that two weeks later as he was moving too fast and pushing too hard for me. And as it turned out, once James and I were through, they needn't have worried about competition from me, because after spending middle school in an all-girl environment I was so outspokenly and unabashedly nerdy in class that for the rest of my high school career the only guy who seemed interested in dating me was a family friend who didn't go to the same school.

In the end, all I learned from their charts was that Angela had a short cycle and Jessica's was either totally irregular, which was not unusual for girls our age, or else she was totally incapable of keeping track of it, also not unusual for girls our age. We were also not coordinated with each other, which was a bad sign for my hypothesis, although I had some ideas about that. Finally, by spring, I admitted to myself that not only was I not going to have any kind of reasonable sample size anytime soon, plus this sort of experiment would probably not work in an urban environment where circadian rhythms are disrupted by artificial nighttime lights, anyway. I kept on keeping track of myself through June, just for the heck of it, and then I reverted to simply recording day 1 as I always had.

But back to the problem at hand. In the cold light of day, I have to wonder, what the hell I had been thinking. Not what I had done, that is not mysterious to me, but how I am going to explain this to Edward. Especially as I am coming up fast on not-safe days. If we are going to be together again—and I still cannot believe we have been _together, _just closing my eyes and thinking about last night makes me start breathing hard and smiling uncontrollably as I lie here—the issue's going to have to come up.

But before I start stressing about that, I have to wonder if it's even going to be an issue. Maybe he's in the other room reproaching himself, regretting it, planning his retreat. I decide it's probably best to get up and face the firing squad, check his mood this morning. I slide my calendar back in the drawer and get up, tucking the note into my underwear drawer before rifling through the rest of my drawers in search of something cute to wear.

A few minutes later I am coming down the hall towards the front room. There's no sign of Edward; when I enter the living room, I see his blankets and pillow are on one end of the couch, folded neatly. I come into kitchen, where Jasper is sitting at the table reading the comics and drinking coffee. I walk over to the sink and use both hands to push myself up over the counter in order to peer out the window to see if his car is gone.

"What are you looking for?" Jasper asks, before I can get a good view of the street in front of the house.

"Nothing." I drop down.

I'm pouring myself a cup coffee when I hear the front door slam and my heart rate speeds up—

"Is there another cup in that pot, Bella?" It's him. I glance over my shoulder. He's looking at me as he comes into the room, holding a paper bag from the closest bagel shop. He comes over to the counter and, standing next to me at the cutting board, starts slicing bagels in half and popping them into the toaster. I go on tiptoe and reach past him to get another coffee cup out of the cupboard, brushing against him unnecessarily as I do it.

"Thanks," he whispers, in a thrillingly intimate tone, when I hand him the coffee. I love the little creases around his mouth and crinkles around his eyes when he smiles at me. I want to drag him back in my room and tear all his clothes off again. I pull my eyes away from him and go over to offer a refill to Jasper, who is still looking at the comics.

I cross back to stand next to him, leaning against the counter. "How's your head, Edward?" I ask, keeping my tone innocent. I feel bold using his name. I've always been kind of shy about saying it, although I feel like he says my name a lot. Then I think about how he made me say it last night and I feel almost dizzy. I don't care how many times we did it last night, I want him again. Right now. I wonder if it's obvious to him.

"Much better. I feel great this morning." He flashes me a dazzling smile. My stomach flops. I notice he's wearing the same clothes he was wearing last night, but somehow he looks as fresh as a daisy. Even his shirt, which is a plain light blue button-down, is somehow unwrinkled. _How did he do that?_

He takes his coffee and crosses the room to sit down at the table. He pushes an empty chair out with his foot in my direction. I smirk at him and stay put, helping myself to a bagel. I'm afraid I'll expose myself if I go near him.

He smirks back at me. "So, any reflections on your night out, Bella? Was it all you had hoped for?"

This really is too much. I bite my lower lip to keep from laughing. I glance at Jasper, but he doesn't seem to be paying attention.

"Now you'll be wanting to do it again."

I nearly choke on the coffee I'm sipping. How am I supposed to "act normal" under this provocation?

He prods. "Right? I'm sure you're going to want to go out dancing all the time now. Seemed like you were having a very good time." I cannot believe how fucking cocky he is. As a McCarty, I strongly feel he needs to be taken down a notch.

"Are you so sure about that?" I ask him, tauntingly. Jasper shoots me a puzzled look.

I continue. "For example, I didn't get to dance with Jasper." I bat my eyelids at Jasper.

"I never knew you cared, little darlin'," Jasper drawls back, picking up another section of the Sunday paper.

"You didn't get to dance with me either," Edward points out. "But that would defeat the purpose."

"What purpose?"

"Showing off that scandalous little dress of yours."

Oh, the bastard. Emmett is walking into the room. Edward carries on, clearly enjoying himself. "Frankly, I'm surprised your brother let you out of the house like that. Emmett, you're falling down on the job."

"I know," sighs Emmett, helping himself to a bagel and smearing cream cheese on it. "I'm taking her for a burka fitting this afternoon."

"D'jou get any numbers?" Jasper asks me. _Oh, sure, pile on, Jasper._

"Nope." _OK, I give up. You win. _I've had just about all I can deal with, now that Emmett's in the room. "'Scuse me, guys, I think I sense some homework piling up."

# # #

Ten minutes later, I'm sitting at my desk, twirling my hair and staring at the wall, trying to figure out how I'm going to deal with this entire situation, when Edward slips through my open door.

"Give me your phone." I love how bossy he sounds—not that I love getting ordered around, I have enough of that with Emmett, but because it implies our new intimacy. I stand up and take my phone out of my pocket and hand it to him. He quickly dials a number and, as soon as the call goes through, hangs up and hands my phone back. "Call me."

A quick smile and he's gone. I look at the number he's just dialed. It must be his.

**This is me, reading _Breaking Dawn:_**

**_Oh my god, they did it…finally. Makes sense to go in the water…so his you-know-what won't feel so jarringly cold…but underwater sex is never as good as it sounds. Hm, I hope they didn't do it on the beach, that sounds worse—all that sand getting all up in there. Maybe he carried her back to that big ol' bed. Oh my god, I need to re-read these three pages. Why is there not more detail? How does a vampire get a hard-on anyway, if he has no blood? Is he just walking around with one_ all the time? _Oh my god, he's knocked her up. Yikes. How many times did they do it? Maybe three, tops. He's so freaking reluctant. And also so barely in control of himself, tearing up pillows with his teeth and busting the headboard. Yowsa. Why were they not using birth control? You know, just in case. Edward! You're usually so cautious! Oh my god, that's dirty. Hundred-year-old vampire marries eighteen-yr-old human girl, knocks her up_ immediately. _Of course he does, he's so good at everything, so is his vampire sperm. Lord, Stephenie Meyer, you are good. First, in book one, there's the whole "Edward, I know it's our first date and all, and I'm a sweet, innocent young girl, but (a) do vampires have sex and (b) can we have sex?" "Sorry, Bella, we can't have sex, I'm just going to lie here in your bed with you all night while your dad is downstairs and run my lips along your collarbones and try not to attack you. You smell so good I can't help myself." Gah! Stephenie! These Mormons know how to get a girl worked up! And now, book three, she's got me sitting here wondering about vampire semen. What the hell, Edward? Birth control pills probably wouldn't even work, his sperm would just go straight on up to her ovaries and crook their tails at her eggs and they'd come running. Maybe this is part of his old-fashioned views on marriage. Is Edward a Catholic? Cullen is an Irish name. She couldn't exactly make him Mormon, that's too fringe, but maybe she made him Catholic. Quick, google the Church of Latter-Day Saints' position on birth control. Yeah, thought so. Not a big fan of it. Holy moly, these books are_ filthy.**


	18. Chapter 18

**A/N: I made a tweak to chapter 17. Instead of saying "I'll call you," Edward tells Bella to call him. Cagey.**

Sunday afternoon I spend in my room, hunched over my desk or sprawled on my bed, trying to do homework but really just worrying about it all afternoon.

I've come to the conclusion that I need to figure out how to tell Edward that I'm not on birth control. It seems impossible to do it without upsetting him or possibly alienating him. I keep thinking back to what Alice told me…how he's bound to have "issues" with women. Now I've done something that is sure to make him regard me as totally untrustworthy. Obviously, I need to clear this up soon, but I also need to figure out how best to do it. If I sleep with him again in the next week, it's going to force the issue: because really, if one is going to be extra careful, I'm past the safe days starting now.

So I agonize about it all afternoon, and don't call him. Not that I was supposed to call him today—when am I supposed to call him, anyway? I saw him this morning. If a boy is calling a girl after they've done it, it would be polite to call the next day…but some boys don't, they wait two or three days because they want to play it cool…leave it longer than that and you're definitely a prick, or just not interested…obviously _this _boy wants to play it cool, which is why he's left the ball in my court.

Ach, I need help. I need to talk to Alice. So I won't call him back today, and I'll see her tomorrow morning.

By the time I have reached this stage in my thinking, it is nine pm, and my homework is still piled half-finished on my desk. I fall asleep as I try to start the Jung reading Alice had assigned me, and reawaken at two to toss and turn for a couple of hours.

# # #

Next day I meet Alice at our usual corner of the café she likes, on the sofa in the corner.

As I'm sitting down and pulling out my notebook, dropping my calculator onto the floor with a clatter, and confessing to her that I'm a little behind in my reading, my phone beeps and I stop talking midsentence to whip it out and look at it, usually not my M.O. when I'm in a conversation with someone, especially a teacher.

I see it's _not _a text from Edward and I tuck it away, refocusing my mind on her. I'm sure I look as scattered as I feel and she immediately asks me, smiling,

"What's up, Bella? You're as jumpy as a cat."

I smile at her sheepishly, not sure how to broach it all.

"And you have dark circles under your eyes."

I brush self-consciously at my cheek.

"So did you have a good weekend?"

I giggle. "Yes."

"A very good weekend." This is more of a statement than a question.

"Yes. Very good…but confusing."

"I take it things have moved along on the romance front?"

"Um, yeah, you could say that." I am looking down and blushing like an idiot. I can't believe I'm telling her this. But then again, I'm not telling her anything, she is reading me like a book.

"OK, I can see by the look on your face that things have moved right along."

"Yes."

"All the way along?"

I nod.

"And now you're trying to figure out where things stand. Where _you_ stand."

I nod again.

"All right." She settles down into the cushions, looking like a cat who's about to tuck into a bowl of cream. "How did you two leave things?"

"I'm supposed to call him."

She throws up her hands and leans towards me, touching my lightly on my knee. "For god's sake, don't call him. That's not your job. He needs to call you." She says this as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

"Oh, come on…" I object.

"Seriously, Bella—I think I said this before—don't pursue him. Definitely don't let him _make _you pursue him. He's just trying to gain the upper hand."

She pauses to take her usual espresso off the side table and stir in a sugar cube with a tiny spoon.

She continues. "This is good advice for any woman, but I think it's especially true in this case, based on what you know about the stance he's taken in his previous relationships. Do not make yourself too available to him, at least at first. You have to keep challenging him."

"You talk as if it's a battle."

"Oh it is, it absolutely is. And he's way more experienced at in than you are, so listen to what I'm telling you. Don't call him this first time, and don't be overeager to jump back in bed with him. Make him sweat a bit, work a bit, _something_."

I have to smile at this—her reasoning is different, but she's come to the same conclusion, that I have to hold him off.

"We've just been reading about the pleasure principle, and the reality principle. The id seeks pleasure, and the mature ego delays pleasure when reality requires it. The ego is still in pursuit of pleasure as well…but it accepts pleasure, diminished, when that is the achievable reality. However, this is a case where deferred gratification does _not _equal pleasure diminished."

She strokes her lip and looks at the ceiling, thinking.

"One reality of the human psyche is that we want what we can't have, and the flip side of that is that we don't want what we _can_ have. If it's too easy, the value lessens. You two are establishing the parameters of your relationship right now—during this little window of time—and at this moment, you want to teach him to value what you're giving him."

"But…what if he _doesn't _call me?"

"How did he seem? Afterwards."

I consider how to put it.

"He seemed sort of…triumphant." The recollection of his behavior makes me smile. "He was teasing me, in front of the others."

"And you liked that?"

I did like it. I liked how, in front of Jasper, he had been speaking to me in our own secret idiom. And when Emmett had come in, it made me nervous, but the danger of it had excited me too. "Yes." She nods. "But, I guess, I'm nervous he's going to start regretting this…or keeping me at a distance…I guess I just want to _know _what's coming, I want to know what's in his _head."_

"But so far, no sign of regret or distance?"

"I'd say, no. He seemed…happy. Not disengaged. Except his wanting _me _to call _him."_

"Yes, exactly. That's a little game he's playing, jockeying for position…but from what you're describing, I'd be very surprised if he didn't circle back, once he realizes you're not playing along. If he doesn't, well, you can't _make _him and you shouldn't try."

I nod, and remain quiet. She looks at me expectantly and waits, so I struggle to start asking what I want to ask.

"I guess, I've been thinking about that thing you said, how he's bound to have issues with women because of that thing with his mother…"

"Right, you said his mother had left the family, you thought when he was ten?"

"Yeah, ten or eleven, I _guess,_ I'm not really sure of the exact timing…but I think not before then."

"OK, he's not only not my patient, I have never met him. So that's a big caveat. People react very differently to difficult situations, some people are more resilient than others, some are good at developing coping strategies. But here goes the textbook thinking. Being abandoned by a parent is a traumatic event. Being abandoned by the same-sex parent will create more havoc in the personality than being abandoned by the opposite-sex parent, but the latter will cast a shadow over romantic relationships. A man who was abandoned by his mother will, stereotypically, have more trouble trusting women than a man whose family remained intact. Obviously. He'll be reluctant to commit, he will try to control the relationship. You've described him as keeping his previous lover at a distance; this sounds like an act of self-defense. He doesn't want to be put in the position of being abandoned by a woman, again, so he does not want to give any woman the power to abandon him."

"And…what if I have done something…untrustworthy?"

"Mm. Well, first, is it _really _something he needs to know? I think some of us have a tendency towards overconfession that is not warranted."

I grimace. "Yes, I think so. Plus he's going to figure it out."

She looks hard at me. I know she's wondering, but I am not going to explain it.

"Is it…another boy? Because I'd say that's not necessarily…"

I cut her off. "No."

"Well, it's hard to say. Not knowing your indiscretion…" she smiles, and pauses, in case I'm going to fill her in. I wait.

"…not knowing your indiscretion, it's hard for me to predict how he'll react. Keeping it a secret longer can intensify feelings of betrayal…but if it's a one-time thing, you don't want to play into his prejudices and poison your relationship before it's strong enough to survive. So think carefully about how and when you come clean."

"Try not to worry too much about what's in his head, and don't let yourself get sucked into his drama. Enjoy him. Enjoy this physical chemistry between you. If you find yourself not liking the interaction between you, or not liking yourself when you're with him, cut bait. This is about enjoying an experience, pure and simple."

# # #

"Is something wrong with your phone?"

It's Edward. His voice is teasing. It's Wednesday, and I've just come out of my last class of the morning. I duck back into the nearly-empty lecture hall.

I feel a surge of triumph. I see clearly now what Alice was saying about gaining the upper hand. I've been on tenterhooks for two and a half days, but our chat bolstered me to be strong and not call him. Now, I want to draw this lovely moment out. Even though he's not there to see it, I remove the phone from my ear, inspect it, and bring it back to my ear. "No, it seems to be working fine. Why do you ask?"

"I thought you were going to call me." He's sounding faux-puzzled.

"Sorry, who is this, please?"

I can hear him smiling.

"Edward," he purrs. I close my eyes as a pleasant tingly feeling washes over me.

"Mm. But how do I know it's really you? My brother Emmett loves to prank call me."

"Perhaps you should ask me a question only I would know the answer to. For instance, what color panties you were wearing on Saturday night. Or, how many times you came."

_Holy crow._ He just turned the tables on me, hard. I'm practically gasping. A few other students are still filing out, and a couple of them are eyeing me. I turn my back and walk farther away from the door.

I clear my throat. "Very well, _Edward._ What can I do for you?" I ask, politely.

"I'd like to see you."

Now it's my turn to smile into the phone.

"Oh? What did you have in mind?" I ask, nonchalantly.

"I have some things I need to say to you."

"That sounds ominous."

He pauses. "Also some things I'd like to do to you."

"And impertinent."

"Are you on campus? Can you come to my office?"

His office? I know the address by heart (stalker): C-557 Padelford. Edward's office. Desk. Chair. Door, with a lock. Couch? Rug? _No way._ I know exactly how quick I'll crumble if placed in that situation alone with him.

"No."

He laughs. "Just…no?" He sounds slightly incredulous. _Good._

"Um, it's a lovely day. It's not raining. Seems a shame to stay indoors."

"Where are you?"

_Lie. _"I'm downtown."

"So what did _you_ have in mind?"

"Well, I was just planning to go over to Bainbridge Island. On the ferry. I haven't been over there since I moved up here." This just pops into my head. I had been thinking about it, since we have had a few clear days this week. Now that I'm hearing his voice, I don't think I can resist seeing him, but I don't want to be in a private place with him. And yet I don't want to be in a public place where we might run into someone like Emmett…or Tanya.

"Bainbridge," he repeats. He's probably calculating the risk of running into anyone. There's a pause. Apparently he finds it acceptably low. "Well, would you like some company on your trip?"

I pause too. "Oh, would _you_ like to come?" As soon as it comes out of my mouth I wince, realizing I've just set myself up for another crack about "coming."

If he notices, he doesn't take the bait. I can hear him typing.

"I'll meet you on board the 12:45."

_Fudge. _I glance at the clock on the wall over the chalkboard. If I get on my bike, quick, I can just about make it.


	19. Chapter 19

I arrive at the ferry landing with just a couple of minutes to spare. My hair is sticking to my neck, my sweater is sticking to my back, and I'm short of breath. _Great._ I unwind my bike chain and fumble with the lock as I attach my bike to the bike rack, then as soon as I get it locked I realize I'm still wearing my helmet, so I have to undo the lock to attach that. Finally I'm bolting for the ticket window, when I stop short because I spot Edward sitting on a bench near the window, legs crossed, watching me with his customary smirk. I slow to a walk, and as I near the window he stands up and hands me a ticket.

"Where did you say you were coming from?" he asks, curiously.

"Sorry, um, I lost track of time."

He purses his lips and nods his head slowly, giving me a look that clearly conveys that he doesn't believe me, but he doesn't push it. As we cross the gangplank I ask him, "Thanks, how much do I owe you for the ticket?"

He ignores this. "Inside or outside?"

"Outside."

Most of the people sitting outside are upstairs on the smaller deck at the stern of the boat, but we wander along the starboard side and find a place to lean on the rails. Every time I get on a boat I wonder why I don't spend more time on boats. It's a little chilly and there are some clouds around the horizon, but the sun is out and the Sound is greenish-blue and sparkling. As the ferry chugs away from the dock and sweeps to the right we get a great view of the Seattle skyline, which we watch recede, and then we walk around to the other side of the boat to get a better view of the islands ahead.

I feel shy of him and not sure what to talk about. He's standing next to me, leaning his elbows on the railing. I glance at his face. He's looking directly at me, with a darkish look.

"What?" I ask, surprised. I feel like he's on to me, or at least suspicious, but he seems disturbed to a greater degree than I would have expected.

"Nothing." He looks away across the water. He seems uncomfortable. He's had quite a mood swing since when I talked to him on the phone.

I bite my lip. This feels awkward. Maybe this was a mistake, engineering this outing this way. I wonder if things would be better if I had gone to his office. Under his fleece pullover I can see his shirt collar and loosened tie. He must have taught a class this morning. I'm studying his profile, marveling at his looks and considering how much I love seeing him in a tie, when he glances sidelong at me again.

"Just wondering what you have up your sleeve."

I grin at this and pull up my sweater sleeves, showing him my pallid forearms.

He smiles crookedly and takes one of my wrists, pulling down my sweater sleeve, and then the other. He places my hands on the railing, one resting primly atop the other. Then he goes back to leaning on his arms.

I feel irked that he is not touching me. I glance around: maybe he's afraid he'll see someone he knows on the boat? He _is_ a teacher, after all…he probably has to think all the time about running into one of his students. And heck, I look like I'm one of his students. So running into one of his colleagues would be equally inconvenient. There is hardly anyone out on these side decks. Seems like most people are inside. Now that we're out on the water it's fairly windy, and the wind is chilly.

I sigh, giving vent to my sense of pique, but then suddenly burst out laughing. I am ridiculous. I chose this plan to make it difficult for anything to _happen_ with him, and now I'm annoyed that he's not all over me? Was I hoping to be fighting him off?

He's looking over at me, surprised by my sudden outburst.

"What?" He has to ask now.

"Nothing," I say, mocking. He smiles a little.

"So…see anyone you know?" I ask, turning my back to the railing and leaning on my elbows, looking up at the poop deck.

He glances upward. "Nope."

"Do you run into your students around town?"

He shrugs. "Not really. I mean, I cross paths with people around campus…"

"Did you teach class this morning?" I am trying to get him talking, loosen him up.

"Yes."

"How's that going?"

He eyes me. "All right."

"I keep thinking about what Emmett said, that you hate teaching because you're a misanthrope."

This makes him really smile, finally.

"Well, that's an exaggeration, but he's kind of right. I don't really like teaching."

"No?"

Since we're facing different directions I'm sort of facing him now, looking up at him. He keeps looking at the water but glances at me.

"I don't have the right personality for it. I'm impatient."

"You don't get a warm and fuzzy feeling of satisfaction when someone 'gets' it?"

He shakes his head. "I appreciate the ones who get it off the bat, and I have no use for the ones who don't. By the time they catch up and get it, I'm annoyed they've been slowing us down. Some are just so ill-prepared coming into class…it's really better for them to drop out. Or, well, better for me."

_Harsh. Maybe Emmett's not exaggerating, actually._ "So…too bad you have to teach. Weren't you not going to, this semester?"

"Yes…" he grimaces. "I'd been toying with the idea of switching over to the research track."

"What does that mean?"

"If you're a research professor, you don't have to teach."

"Oh." _Sounds perfect. _"Why not do that, then?"

"Well, the problems are it pays less, and it's not tenure track. Not at UW, any rate. And, you need soft money funding."

"Soft money?"

"You have to get grant funding from a federal agency. It used to be, during the Cold War…" he smiles slightly at me, "…the US congress mandated federal agencies to outperform and outspend the Soviets. So there was a ton of money poured into research grants, and scientists and other professors who could get them were doing a great favor to their universities, so research professorships really took off and developed as a separate track. You could provide your own salary, and didn't have to teach in exchange."

He adds, "Now, though, it's much harder to get funded, and you spend all your time writing grants. So which is worse, teaching slowpokes or writing endless grants? That's what I have to figure out. Maybe if I avoid teaching underclassmen it'd be bearable…" He suddenly smiles apologetically at me. "Sorry."

I shrug this off, shaking my head slightly to let him know I'm not offended. I'm not easily offended. In the McCarty household, that just makes you a mark.

"Did you get turned down for a grant you were wanting, is that what happened?"

"No, I'm in an area with very practical potential applications. It was more…some things were coming up that made it unwise for me to go down a less secure path. I would have to make a certain commitment if I switched tracks, like three years, and I became a little worried to switch away from the tenure track for that long right now."

I wonder what was "coming up" for him. I pause and turn around, looking back over the water. "What about other universities, it sounds like some of them have tenure-track research positions?"

"That's right."

"So why don't you go elsewhere?"

He grins at me. "Trying to get rid of me already?"

"Ha."

"Well, I don't really want to leave. I feel I owe a lot to the University of Washington. They were really there for my father, they really made it happen for him."

I think back to Rosalie's words and smile at him.

"You're so loyal." _When you want to be._

He lifts an eyebrow at me.

I clarify. "I mean, it seems like you and your dad were pretty close."

"There were just the two of us, so I really came to see things from his point of view."

I am thinking about how _alone_ Edward must be now, with his father and mother both _gone, _in one way or another_. _He's not that old to have no parents left…_how old _is _he anyway?_

"How long ago did your dad die?"

"Three years."

"How old were you?"

He smiles at my transparent question. "Twenty-four."

After a pause, he asks,

"What about _your_ parents? I was wondering, how did it go when they finally remembered your birthday?"

I roll my eyes and smile. "Oh, well, my mom was beside herself."

"That's good."

"I mean, I don't blame them. There was so much going on over the last year, and they were finally trying to take a little break…"

"You're very easy-going, aren't you."

I frown at this. "I don't know. I can be hard on myself."

"But forgiving of other people."

"I suppose. I try to see things from other people's point of view. I think people's intentions are generally good. Certainly my mom's and my dad's."

"What does your mom do? Does she work?"

"She's at home now because of the baby. But she teaches. Kindergarten. At Immaculate Conception."

"Immaculate Conception?"

"My grade school."

He smiles as if he's biting his tongue.

"What?" I prod.

"Still got the uniform?"

I smack him on the arm. He catches my hand, kisses it, and tucks it under his arm.

"Come on, we're almost there." He steers us towards the crewman who is preparing to open a section of the railing for disembarkment. "What's on the agenda?"

"I didn't get that far." He rolls his eyes. I add, "I don't care what we do." He smiles at this.

# # #

Forty-five minutes later, we're in Winslow, eating ice cream at a little table outside an adorable ice-cream shop. He'd insisted on ordering grilled cheese sandwiches, one for himself and one for me, "so that I wouldn't get faint or malnourished," after I assured him I was still doing fine after my mid-morning mid-lecture snack of yogurt and three powdered sugar mini donuts. When I was nearly done with my sandwich he'd gone back inside and got us the ice cream—balsamic roasted strawberry in a cone for me, and salted chocolate chip in a cup for himself.

"Really? Balsamic vinegar?" I'd asked.

"Try it."

I gave it a tentative lick. It had an intense strawberry flavor. "Oh, mm, that's good."

Now I'm really getting into the ice cream, closing my eyes and swirling the cone against my tongue as I try to figure out whether that's black pepper I taste or if the balsamic is just a little spicy, and noticing how roasting strawberries seems to make them sweeter but the flavor is not too cloying because of the slight bite of the vinegar, but the vinegar is sweet too…when I open my eyes I find Edward looking at me with an amused half-smile on his face. I'm suddenly aware of how suggestive that must have looked and can feel the redness flooding my cheeks. This only incites him. He leans in and hisses,

"Bella, what are you doing to that cone? This is a family establishment."

I start giggling out of sheer embarrassment, then give him a smirk and take a big, sudden bite out of the top of the ice cream.

He straightens up. "Ouch," he laughs.

Now I'm only laughing harder and can't stop, and am simultaneously trying to lick off the ice cream I can feel is all over my mouth. Suddenly Edward's hand is on the back of my neck and his mouth is on mine. My laughing turns into humming as I kiss him back, and I feel his hand moving up from my neck to the back of my head, caressing me while also holding my head in place while his lips crush mine. I can feel warmth spreading through the center of me, this is turning me on like a light switch.

After a minute he loosens his hold, stops kissing me but leans his forehead against mine for a moment, then lets me go. I feel dizzy. He gives me a crooked smile and hands me a napkin, leaning in to whisper in my ear,

"Wipe your mouth before I lick all that ice cream off of you."

My tongue darts out automatically and I start licking my lips, while suddenly I'm imagining what would happen if Edward and I were alone in a room with this ice cream cone, imagining myself stripping off my sweater and smearing frigid ice cream from this cone onto my breasts, imagining how he would lunge at me and take my whole breast in his mouth, and then I stop licking my lips when I see the ferocious look Edward's giving me, like he can read my thoughts and might in fact be about to lunge at me. I also notice, over his shoulder, that there's a couple of middle-aged ladies a couple of tables over watching us suspiciously, and I drop my eyes and wipe my mouth with the napkin. Seattle's not a place that takes kindly to this sort of display. I feel like we'd better get out of here before we get asked to leave.

"Should we walk?" I ask him. He nods and stands up when I stand up. I can't help glancing at his crotch when he stands but his fleece is covering and camouflaging anything going on down there. Surely he's as worked up as I am. I am desperate to feel his body against mine. We're wandering aimlessly up the street and around the corner, along what turns into a residential street, and as we pass the back of the ice cream shop I notice a little staircase with three steps leading up to a back door. I pull him over toward the stairs, step onto the bottom step, and turn to face him.

"You have ice cream on _your _mouth," I mumble, and kiss his upper lip to clean it off. He takes charge of the kiss, but he doesn't grab me and pull me close like I'm angling for. I'm dying to know, so I let my free hand—the one not holding my ice cream cone—wander down and I brush the back of it against him. When I find his hardness I turn my hand around, feathering my fingertips long it, searching upwards for the tip.

He grabs my wrist and pulls my hand away. "No."

I frown. "Please," I whisper.

"Please what?" His voice is a growl. His lips are below my ear and his breath is hot. "'Please let me tease you'?" he asks, sarcastically, his tone mincing in imitation of my voice.

"Please let me touch you."

"No."

_Fuck. What am I doing. _I can't control myself around him. However, he's taking control of the situation and is steering me, his hand around my upper arm, back down towards the quaint street of shops that constitutes downtown Winslow. When we get to the corner, he releases my arm and smiles at me mockingly.

"Finish your ice cream. It's melting." He chucks his cup into a trash bin. "Well, want to look at the shops?" His smile glints with triumph.

# # #

**A/N: Oh **_**dear. **_**This chapter is getting so long…I guess I'll have to break it in **_**two.**_


	20. Chapter 19 part 2

**A/N: A few remarks.**

**Hee hee, yes I am a tease. But look, this chapter **_**is **_**long! I had to get ahead of myself so that I'll be able to have something ready for you guys **_**next **_**Friday…next week is Thanksgiving so it's tough but I think I can do it!**

**Have fun seeing BD this weekend if you're going. If anyone knows where to find the scene(s) they had to cut to get the film down to a PG rating please let me know. I'm mainly interested in the outtakes.**

As we round the corner onto Winslow's main street, I am kicking myself mentally. _What is my problem? I am the _girl_ here, for god's sake. I am supposed to be putting him off, and instead I'm trying to _molest _him. Alice would be so disappointed. Pull yourself together, Bella._

I glance up at him—he's strolling along next to me, hands in pockets, looking particularly smug. Can he see right through me? He accused me of teasing him, and I _was _feeling him up with no intention of seeing it through…I hadn't meant it that way, I had just been curious about whether or not he was as excited as I was…I huff and head into a bookstore we come across a couple doors down from the ice cream place. He follows me in. I ignore him, circling around the tables at the front of the shop and picking up random recommended titles and perusing the back cover copy, except that in fact I am so distracted that I am unable to actually comprehend anything I'm reading. I'm very turned on, I'm regretting my behavior, and I'm simultaneously reminding myself that I am _definitely_ not sleeping with him today, no matter what. After talking to Alice on Monday, when she had told me _not _to jump back into bed with Edward and to be careful about how I told him about the other thing, I had thought about it and thought about it and finally made an appointment for Friday at the women's health clinic to get fitted for a diaphragm. That way I don't have to bring the issue of condoms up with him right away, I can just take care of it. The diaphragm seems like a royal pain in the butt, but process of elimination brought me there. That appointment's not till Friday—and I took that late-in-the-week appointment as insurance that I wouldn't slip up earlier in the week.

Meanwhile, he's picked up a thick tome from the biography shelf and has started thumbing through it, while I keep circling the tables and mindlessly flipping over books, and after about ten minutes he completely startles me by creeping up behind me and whispering in my ear,

"Find something you're interested in?"

"What?" I turn the book in my hand back over to check the title again. "Oh, I don't know." I drop it back on the table.

"Are you aware you've picked up that book three times?"

I burst out laughing and shake my head. I head straight for the door and he follows me onto the sidewalk.

"What next?" he asks in a sprightly tone.

_Oh, I give up. _I am utterly charmed by him, even—or especially?—when he is tormenting me."OK, we're just going to go into every third store, no matter what it is."

We pass two more shops, and the third is a knitting store.

"Really? You're going to make me go in there?" he asks.

"Yes. You can just sniff the wool if you're bored."

"What?"

"Well, that's what I like to do. You know, it has such a comforting animal smell."

"What are you talking about, like wet wool? It's not comforting. It stinks."

"No, I mean the way dry wool smells, I don't want to say gamey, but _animal._"

He looks at me like I'm crazy so I head into the shop and start picking up and sniffing skeins of wool until I find a really nice-smelling coarse dark green one that I stick under his nose.

"Hm…" he takes it from me and sniffs it again. "I see what you mean." He buries his nose in it.

I have one thick red scarf I knitted a few years ago that I love to bury my nose in, but when I pulled it out this fall I noticed a couple of holes in it, like a moth got to it. Maybe it's time for a new one. I pick up a couple more skeins of the green wool and take them to the counter and buy them.

Outside, he takes the wool out of my shopping bag and smells it again.

"I like it…when you buy a wool sweater it never smells like that." He drops it back in the bag.

"Maybe I'll knit you a scarf, then you can sniff it all the time."

He leans over and sticks his nose into the crook of my neck as we walk. "I'd rather have one that smells like you," he purrs. I give him a shove. I've only just calmed down again, and I am determined not to let him rile me up again.

"What happened to the shirt I sent you, don't you still have _that?_" I ask him superciliously.

He grins. "I don't think you want to know what happened to that shirt."

_Oh my god_. I duck into the next third doorway, which is an overstuffed antique shop, packed to the rafters with chairs, lamps, paintings of dogs, and all sorts of neat things you'd expect to find in some platonic ideal of grandma's attic. I say hello to the shopkeeper and wander around, looking at mercury glass Christmas tree ornaments, a wooden box full of old dental instruments, a stack of postcards from the 1940s, and so on, while Edward finds a box of old records on vinyl and starts going through them one by one, taking some out of the sleeves and inspecting them. Finally he takes a couple of them over to the small table where the shopkeeper is sitting, reading the newspaper, to buy them. I come to look over his arm at them. They're both old jazz records, Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis.

As we walk out the door, I pose the obvious question. "You have a turntable?"

He nods. "I have my dad's turntable." He lets me pass through the door first, then continues. "And his living room sofa, and his dining room table…and his house."

_Oh. _I know from a random comment made by Rosalie that Edward lives in Capitol Hill, which is on the other side of campus from where we live, and not far from my dress shop. And I had the impression he lived alone, but I sort of imagined him in a flat. Some sort of sparsely furnished, grad-studenty flat, probably pretty tidy for a guy's place because he seemed that way. He was over at the house fairly often, but never seemed to have Emmett and the rest over. Or, at least, not since I was on the scene.

"Wow, his house. Like, you mean you own it now?" I am starting to get a little freaked out. He's an adult, he's twenty-seven, he has a _house…_is he _really _going to be interested in someone like me, some little girl like me? Not for long, I warn myself.

He looks a little embarrassed. "Well, I'm paying the mortgage on it, but it's pretty reasonable thanks to how long ago my dad bought it…cheaper than renting a similar place now."

I bite my tongue, not wanting to sort of _remind _him of the gulf between us by expressing shock or asking the wrong question…but curiosity washes over me.

"Did you guys live together?" I ask, doubtfully.

He grins at this and shakes his head. "You must think I'm quite a nerd."

We've reached the corner of the block. The road continues on, parallel to the waterfront, but the shops end and there are no houses, either. Kitty-corner across the street a gravel path leads down to a rocky little beach. He stops and gestures with his thumb to the coffeeshop on the corner.

"Do you want a coffee?" he asks. The afternoon sun is slanting severely now, and the way it hits his eyes makes them a luminous shade of clear green, like green glass. I've never seen anyone with quite his eye color. I have that feeling again that he's so beautiful it's hard to look directly at him.

"I'm OK, do you want one?"

He shakes his head no. We keep walking and meander down the path to the beach.

"I don't think you're a nerd at all, " I respond belatedly to his remark.

"I was probably way more of a nerd at your age than you are." _Hm. Is he thinking—worrying?— about our ages right now too?_

"I dunno, my friends tell me I'm a pretty big nerd." I smile. We reach the edge of the water and stop there.

He's kicking rocks with the toe of one boot and looking at his feet. He turns his head sideways to look at me.

"How's it going, making new friends here?"

I bite my lip. "Well, it's slow-going, I guess. It's not ideal, in that respect, living off campus with my brother." The only person I've really sort of sussed out as a potential friend is the girl in my bio section whom I'd bonded with over nineteenth-century novels. I had used her as part of my lie to Emmett about going to that movie with Edward, but I hadn't invented her out of whole cloth. I keep meaning to invite her out for a coffee, but haven't quite gotten around to it.

"No, I imagine not."

"But what can you do. It's cheaper. And, I guess they want to keep an eye on me."

He cocks an eyebrow. As the implication of what I just said dawns on me, I start to laugh. "I guess _that's _not working out so well," I remark dryly.

He's smiling as he stoops down and picks up a rock to fling into the water. I find a dry place to set my bag down and start looking for a flat rock to skip. I crouch down and throw it Frisbee-style, sending it over the water. It skips once and I try again, sinking the second rock but skipping the third one a couple of times.

"Did you always live in that house in Port Angeles?" he asks, suddenly.

"Yes, why?" I glance at him as I pick up more flat stones.

"For someone who grew up on a lake, you're not much of a stone-skipper."

I drop my jaw in mock outrage. "OK, Mr. Smarty-Pants." I hand him the rocks. "Let's see your amazing technique."

He puts down his records, weighs the rocks I've handed him and takes my hand, emptying the rocks back into it. He looks around for his own choice of rocks, picks up a couple, and then throws one, not using a normal crouching posture but rather holding the rock above his head and then sweeping his hand forward and stepping forward at the same time. The rock skips twice. He throws the second rock in the same peculiar manner, and it skips four times.

"Lucky throw."

He glances at me, amused. "I'm just warming up." He scouts around and picks up several more flat rocks. Big ones. Then he throws them all, one by one, in the same manner. They all skip several times, and a couple of them just sail on and on across the water, skipping nine or ten times.

"OK, I'm impressed," I confess. Then I deepen my voice and add, in my best impression of a caveman, "Me impressed at rock-throw prowess, Thag."

He looks sharply at me. "Was that a _Far Side _reference?"

I smile back at him, pleased that he recognizes it.

"You're a funny girl, Isabella McCarty."

"_Now _do you think I'm a nerd?"

He doesn't answer this, but asks, "Want some tips?"

I'm puzzled for a moment, thinking he's razzing me.

"On your stone-skipping technique," he clarifies.

I roll my eyes at him. "I just don't have your upper-arm strength." This makes me think of how he picked me up last weekend and put me against the wall, which in turn makes me flush. I fling one of my rocks in the water as a distraction.

"You do throw like a girl."

"I _am _a girl."

He leans in to murmur in my ear, "I know." He takes me by the shoulders and turns me around so I'm facing away from him. "But it's not upper-arm strength. It's physics."

He puts a large, flat rock in my right hand.

"This is too heavy. It's going to sink."

"No it's not." He stoops down and picks up a few more rocks, which he puts in my left hand. "Counterbalance," he explains. He steps close behind me and puts his hands on my waist to position me at the angle he wants, which is very distracting, and leans his head down to talk in my ear.

"OK, you're trying to throw the rock parallel to the surface of the water, and the trick is to put some English on it so it's also spinning parallel to the surface. It's all about the spin. That makes the stone skid along the water on its trailing side. Like it's waterskiing. If it's not spinning right, it starts somersaulting and plunges in."

He slides his right hand up my waist and brings my right arm up over my head, the way he'd held his. Then he slides his left hand up and brings my left hand in front of my body. Then he puts his hands back on my waist and says,

"OK. Take a breath and let it out as you throw, and take a step forward with this foot"—his left hand slides down my waist and over my jean-clad hip until it's resting on the side of my thigh—_sweet Jesus—_"and let the rock go at waist level." He guides my right arm down and outward. "OK?"

He takes his hands away and steps back from me. I briefly wonder if he's goading me into molesting him again, but he's waiting for me to throw the rock. I try to banish the thought from my mind and follow his instructions. I swing my arm down and release the rock, but it just sails over the water a ways and plunges in. I wince. He chuckles and hands me another rock.

'Try again. Don't forget the spin."

I try again, and this time I get four skips. I turn to him excitedly. "Did you see that?" He smiles and hands me another rock. I throw a few more, with pretty good results, and them watch him skip a couple more, dancing them way out along the water's surface. He's so good at it. He's so good at _everything._

The sun dips down behind the hills behind us and the beach is totally in shadow now. It's getting chilly. We've stopped throwing rocks and are just looking at the harbor. There's a stretch of silence.

"We should probably head back soon. You don't have a coat," Edward remarks.

"I'm fine," I respond automatically.

"Still, it's starting to get dark." He picks up my bag of yarn and hands it to me, and picks up his records. We start back up the hill towards the ferry dock. While we're sitting on the dock waiting for the next boat I ask him about the records he bought, trying to suss out what kind of music he likes. I don't know much about jazz. As we board the boat, he asks, "Inside this time?"

"Can we sit outside? It's nicer."

"Sure."

We lean against the railing again, and as the boat gets underway he notices me shivering.

"You _are_ cold."

"Just a little, it's fine." I'm wearing a sweater, but it's only medium heavy and it's not a turtleneck.

He looks around and moves towards one of the benches that are nestled here and there opposite the railings, which are inset a little and sheltered from the wind. He sits down on the closest one and says, "Come here."

I move to sit down next to him but he pulls me onto his lap so I'm sitting sideways. He pulls me against him and starts briskly rubbing my arm, then my back. I nestle my head against his shoulder and my nose into the crook of his neck, breathing in the smell of him, sliding my arms around him, sheer happiness coursing through my veins. We sit that way for a few minutes, and I'm thinking I never want to move, but then he tilts his head down like he's trying to peer at my face and I lift my head to look at him and now he's kissing me. His lips are warm and soft and at first he's just giving me sweet pecks, now on my lower lip, now the upper one, now the corner of my mouth, and then he takes his hand up along the back of my neck and sweeps it in a circle to wrap my hair around it. He moves my head to the angle he wants and then starts exploring my lips with his tongue, just gently, and touching the tip of my tongue with his. The confusing combination of sensations—he's holding my head in place by my hair—speaking of _cavemen,_ I chuckle internally—but just gently, almost tentatively, exploring me with his tongue—is liquefying me. My heart is pounding thickly and my legs are trembling, I want _more_. I don't even want to molest him now, I want him to molest _me, _I want him to tear off my clothes and _let loose, _take me, I want to give myself to him and let him do whatever he wants. His tongue is deeper in my mouth now, but not as deep as I want it, and I'm swirling my tongue around his and _moaning. _I find I'm leaning back slightly, pulling him towards me, because I have this irresistible urge to lie down on my back and pull him on top of me, even though there's no room here, so now I'm leaning against the steel wall at the side of the bench with one of his hands on the small of my back and he's taken his other hand out of my hair and is running it slowly up and down the outside of my thigh, from knee to hip, which is exquisite torture because I need it between my legs.

I hear the clank of footsteps walking by our bench, and as they pass away Edward stops stroking my leg and slowly stops kissing me with his tongue, just giving me unhurried, gentle pecks again, and finally he stops and murmurs in my ear,

"Better not get carried away. We're in _public."_

All I can think is, _is he going to ask me over. _I know I'll say yes. Hell yes. Yes, yes, yes. I don't know _what_ I'll do about the other thing, and I am worried he _is_ going to ask me over, but I am more afraid of his _not _asking me over. That is unthinkable.

He pulls me back upright so I'm sitting upright on his lap and not leaning against the wall, and starts kissing me sweetly again, and now I can feel his cock hard against the outside of my thigh—though after what happened earlier I take care not to push against him or otherwise touch it without an invitation—and all I can think is to tell myself not to_ ask _to come over, because that is the utterly shredded state of my willpower. There's no question of holding him off, now—I just don't want to beg.

He doesn't say anything, he just keeps kissing me sweetly for the rest of the ride, sometimes brushing my hair away from my neck and kissing me there or under my ear, which doesn't soothe me but simply sends fresh thrills along different nerves, and by the time we're docking in dusky Seattle I am a throbbing-between-the-legs, wild-eyed, weak-kneed mess.

He still doesn't say anything as he steers me off the boat and back towards the bike rack. Finally he clears his throat and says,

"Let's get you home before they start wondering. I don't like the idea of you riding your bike at rush hour in the dark—I'll give you a ride."

I pause, wondering if I'm understanding him right. Then manage to get out a slow, "OK…." My voice rises dubiously at the end, as if I'm about to say "…but…"

I'm not sure what would come after "but," however, so I leave it at "OK." I stand there for another moment, my thoughts flurried, until he asks, in a joshing voice, whether I'm going to unlock my bike. I dig in my pocket for the key as he's telling me how his car is not too far away, in one of those city lots underneath the freeway overpass, and as I walk alongside him wheeling my bike I am reminded of that night at the movies and feel the same disbelieving anger swelling up. By the time I'm sitting on the cold leather passenger seat of his car and trying to breathe deeply, to let the excitement fade, I'm turning the irritation against myself, reproaching myself for my complete failure of resolution and thinking, yes, the disappointment is hard to swallow but this is what I _wanted, _isn't it? To not sleep with him. _And, frankly, Bella, what was going to happen when you asked him if he had a condom handy—how the fuck was that conversation going to unfurl?_

He gets on the freeway and we drive in silence for a while, while I find myself thinking back to his words on the phone this morning. The things he needed to say to me and the things he wanted to do to me. Is _this_ what he wanted to do? Work me up into a frenzy and then leave me unsatisfied? Or did his ideas change. I feel like I'm being punished by him. What did he need to say to me, I wonder—and suddenly, as he takes my exit, I blurt it out.

"What did you mean, this morning, when you said there were some things you needed to say to me?"

He glances tentatively at me, to my surprise. There's a long pause. "Maybe this isn't the moment," he says.

"Please, don't leave me _hang_ing," I respond. I let my voice go sharp and sarcastic.

He raises both eyebrows and looks coolly at me. "All right," he purrs. His voice is velvety but has a slight edge to it.

"About last Saturday night…" He pauses again.

"Yes," I say, impatient.

"Next time…I think we'd better use a condom…even though…"—he gestures towards me, making a circular motion with his hand—"and not that I didn't like it, because I really liked it…"—here he gives me a wolfish smile—"but I think it makes things…unclear."

I'm startled, and also not sure what this means. I give him an inquiring look.

"I don't want to give you the wrong idea…"—another flashback to that night at the movies—"…that this is a more serious, exclusive thing than it is…"

I feel a cold shock run down my spine. "What are you saying?" I ask, confusedly. _Is he seeing someone else?_ I have a flash of horror that maybe Tanya's not the only one. Perfectly possible. Then I also realize he hasn't _told _me about Tanya. He may assume I know, but maybe I'm not the only one here with nagging secrets. _God, what an idiot I am._

He pulls the car over to the side of the road, about a block from my house, then leans back in his seat, rubbing his forehead. He suddenly seems to have gone from cool cucumber to all stressed out.

"This is coming out all wrong. I feel like I'm giving you a speech intended for…someone else. I think these things when I'm alone, but when I'm with you, they don't…work."

I'm still struggling with what he just said. "Are you seeing someone…else?" _Is he even '_seeing' _me? Who knows what this is._

"No." He brushes his fingers against the back of my hand. "I'm not seeing anyone else. Scratch that last bit I said. But I don't want you to get all starry-eyed about this…I'm not the easiest person to get involved with, and you shouldn't set yourself up for disappointment."

I do feel a flash of disappointment at what he's saying, but an even stronger sense of relief swelling up in me. _He's solving my problem for me. I don't have to figure out how to ask him to use a condom…or get a diaphragm…I don't have to freak him out and send him running for the hills…_The relief of this, mixed with the relief of his saying he's not seeing anyone else, wins out over the disappointment and I start laughing, like full-belly laughing.

He gives me a shocked look and rubs his forehead again. "You don't react the way I expect," he says, slightly peevishly.

"I'm sorry," I gasp. I wipe my eyes and try to contain myself. "It's just that I'm so happy you're saying this. I've been thinking the same thing."

"The same thing?"

"That we should use condoms."

He nods, and puts his hands on the steering wheel. "OK. Good. I don't want to feel like I'm taking advantage of you." He adds, in a mutter, "Any more than I am."

He looks at me again, clearly wondering about what's behind my response. "Have you been regretting…?"

I smile at him. "No," I say, emphatically.

He smiles, and looks down. "Or is it…in case you've been worrying, I should have said something before. I'm very careful…what we did was not…"—he glances at me—"typical for me."

He had said something that night about always using condoms, but I appreciated his saying it.

"It was a first for me," I answer. I add, involuntarily, "I trust you." I don't know why I say it, but it's true.

He looks back over at me, his face softening. He looks almost sad. "Don't." He enunciates the 't.'

I feel uncomfortably vulnerable, suddenly, like I'm expressing a feeling he doesn't share, and I slip automatically into teasing mode. "_Next _time, huh…you're very presumptuous. What makes you think there's going to be a next time?"

"Aren't you taking Econ 101?" he dishes back. "You tell me. Past performance predicts future behavior." _Bastard. _I'm suddenly _glad _that he's not asking me home so that I can not give in to him.

As if he can read my thoughts, he leans in and murmurs in my ear, "Why are you trying to resist me?"

I bite back a smile. "I don't know what you're talking about," I say, haughtily.

He kisses my neck—_uh-oh, here we go again—_then says, "There's something you haven't come clean about."

My heart nearly stops. My brain is starting to flail—_what does he know? how does he know?_—when he continues,

"Were you on campus this morning when I talked to you?"

I close my eyes and laugh weakly. I am so relieved that he doesn't _know _that I give up all pretense. "I wanted to just spend some time with you," I whisper back.

"Then why not say so, tell me you wanted to go out on a date." He's nuzzling me with his nose.

I think about his question. I'm pleased he's calling it a date. Despite his implying, now, that I should have just asked, I suspect that he would somehow not have been keen on it had I been more direct from the start.

"I wasn't sure you would want to spend time with me that way."

He cocks his head at me. He seems uncertain. Maybe I've hit it.

"What do you mean," he says. Not really a question.

"I don't know, I'm just a kid, not sure you think of me as someone to hang out with like that." _There. I've said it._

He considers this, then says—very sincerely, suddenly—

"It's not like that." He pauses, and goes on. "I do like hanging out with you." His voice is tinged with surprise.

I suppose I should feel offended by the surprise, but I don't. I feel like he's being honest with me, and even if the way he's saying this is not the most polite…the gist of it is good.

"You don't seem like a kid." His tone is reproachful.

He grins suddenly. "Or maybe it's a sign of my own immaturity."

He brushes the back of my hand again with his fingertips, then picks up my hand and kisses it.

"Do you want me to take you closer to your house?" he asks.

I glance up the street. "This is fine." I pull open my door and meet him at the back of the car, where he is unlatching my bike. He hands me my helmet and shopping bag from the trunk, and I put the helmet on my head and climb on my bike.

He closes the trunk of his car and leans against it, crossing his arms. "Can I see you on Saturday night?" he asks.

"I'll check my calendar." He smiles and rolls his eyes at me as I pedal off.

I know I have a long night ahead of me. That was the most complicated conversation I've ever had. Not to mention the most complicated afternoon I've ever had.


	21. Chapter 21

**A/N: Sorry, I've been in a pumpkin pie–induced stupor for the last five days. **

As I open the front door and walk into the house, I have to fight an immediate urge to turn on my heel and walk back out. Rosalie and Tanya are just settling down on the living room couch, a glass of white wine in Rosalie's hand and a mug in Tanya's. I haven't seen Tanya since poker night, and in the meantime I seem to have developed a severe physical aversion to her. I walk in and close the door, pulse pounding, and try to go straight to my room to drop my things.

"Bella!" Rosalie sings out, cheerfully. "Did you go shopping? What'd you get?"

I look down at the bag in my hand. "Just some yarn."

"Oh, where did you go?"

I look at the bag again. I think about fibbing, just as a knee-jerk reaction to hide my tracks, but that seems unwise since the name of the shop is on the bag. "This shop in Bainbridge."

"Oh, did you go over there today? By yourself?"

"Yeah." I nod erratically.

"You had a nice day for it. You should tell me next time you go, I'll go with you. I love looking in the shops over there."

"OK." I'm edging down the hall towards my room.

"So, Bella, we were just talking about this weekend…"

I give up and come back in the front room, setting my bag and helmet down on the shoe cubby by the door. I notice a couple of stretched canvases leaning up against the wall.

"Oh, was Alice here?" I ask, pointing at them. Alice had told me she was going to pick some up for me next time she picked up supplies for her regular painting technique classes.

"I don't know, not when we were here. Ask Emmett."

"Where is he?"

"He went to the store with Jasper for some snacks."

"Oh." Speaking of snacks, I start to head into the kitchen, when she repeats, "So this weekend, I was thinking of taking everyone out to dinner."

I stop in the doorway. "Wow, why?"

She beams. "I'm getting my master's this week. I mean, it's just incidental, but seems like a good reason to celebrate." Rosalie is pursuing a Ph.D. in history, like Jasper.

"Oh my gosh, congratulations. We should definitely celebrate."

"OK, I was just asking Tanya, how does Saturday night sound?"

Tanya breaks in. "Could it be Sunday? I have a date on Saturday."

We both look at Tanya. Rosalie asks, "Can you have your date on Friday?"

"No, we have symphony tickets."

"OK, maybe Sunday, then. I have a busy day on Friday. Bella?"

"Oh, sure, I'm free."

"Good," Rosalie nods.

"Who else is coming?" asks Tanya.

There's a pause before Rosalie answers. "I'm inviting the usual suspects. Is that going to be OK?"

I take this as my cue to slip into the kitchen. I kind of want them to keep talking, which seems more likely if I'm not standing there. I go over to the stove and put the still-warm kettle back on.

I can hear Tanya answering. "Yes, yes, please don't worry. I'm in a good place." After a moment she goes on. "I've been doing this cleanse that my acupuncturist has been trying to get me to do for the last year…you're going to laugh. No booze, no caffeine, no dairy, no meat, no wheat, no soy…" She sounds like she's ticking off fingers and running out of fingers.

"No soy? Jesus, Tanya, what can you eat?"

"Well, a lot of vegetables. Rice is OK. I can have wheat and soy after the first two weeks. And she gave me this protein powder."

"How long does it go on for?"

"A month." I hear Rosalie laugh.

"Also…I've sworn off men for a while."

"I thought you just said you had a date?"

There's another pause, and then Rosalie goes, "Oh!..."

The tea kettle starts whistling, interfering with my eavesdropping and probably reminding them of my presence. I snatch it off the burner and fetch a mug and a peppermint teabag out of the cupboard near the stove, and as I make my tea I listen with my sharpest ears, but they've stopped talking, or rather dropped into a low murmur I can't quite make out. I bring my tea and come out of the kitchen, intending to take it into my room, when the front door opens and Emmett and Jasper, peacoated and beanied, come in with a gust of cold air.

I greet them and stand there awkwardly with my tea, stealing a glance at Tanya. She does look more cheekboney than usual.

"So guys," Rosalie is saying. "I think we're on for Sunday, is that OK?"

Emmett says, "Sure, sounds good," and Jasper nods and they head into the kitchen with their grocery bags. I follow them back into the kitchen, intending to ask Emmett about the canvases.

Rosalie is talking again. "So it's my treat. I wanted to try that new Singaporean place, have you heard about it?"

Tanya sounds excited. "Really? That place is supposed to be outstanding. Hey, can I bring my friend?"

Rosalie is unsure. "Hm. I thought maybe just the gang."

"Oh, I've known her a while, I think everyone will like her…she was in my J.D. program, now she's a JAG."

"Really? A military lawyer?"

"Yeah. And here's the thing, she's been stationed in Singapore for a while, but she just got back. So how perfect is that? It would be interesting to see what she thinks. I think the food there is really interesting."

Rosalie says something I can't make out. Tanya goes on, "I always got this vibe from her, you know, and then we ran into each other last week and we just ended up talking for hours."

_Hm, maybe that fake lesbian dance club stuff wasn't so fake (at least on Tanya's end)? Is she bi?_ I've never met anyone before who's bi…at least no one I know of.

Now I'm standing awkwardly in the kitchen facing the guys as I listen in on the girls. Jasper finishes putting something in the oven and turns to look at me expectantly. I drag my eyes towards Emmett.

"Did my tutor stop by this afternoon with those canvases?"

Emmett shrugs as he steps out of the kitchen. "Not when I was here. Tanya, are you staying for dinner…" He goes in the other room to get filled in on her new dietary restrictions.

Jasper clears his throat. I look at him and grin, suddenly remembering our last exchange on the subject of Alice. I go sit myself down at the table.

"So," I begin. "Did she just drop them off?"

He grabs himself a beer out of the fridge, pops off the top using the bottle opener we have screwed onto the wall, and pours it into a glass.

"She hung out for a little while in case you were going to show up."

"Oh yeah? Did you hit on her?" I look expectantly at Jasper.

"_Hit_ on her? Bless your heart," he drawls. I always find it amusing when he pulls out the accent. Then he gives me a funny little smile. "Would it make you uncomfortable if I asked her out?"

"No, that's fine. Did you get her number?"

"I got her card."

I snort. "Are you thinking of employing her in a professional capacity?"

He smirks at me and says, emphatically, "No."

"Are you going to call her?"

"We'll see."

"Well, she's not going to call you."

"Is that some sort of a challenge?"

"No…I'm just letting you know."

"Care to make it interesting?"

"What, are you _betting_ me she'll call you?"

"That's right."

"You're on. What are we betting?"

"Just a gentleman's bet."

"You're on." I add, "You're very sure of yourself."

"Yeah."

"I wouldn't be too sure…you should be aware that she's girded for battle."

"What battle?"

"The battle of the sexes."

"Well, it's a good thing I'm a student of military history." The oven timer goes off and Jasper collects a burrito, puts it on a plate, and salutes me on his way out of the kitchen. I'm about to sidle down the hall to my room when Emmett comes back in.

"I'm making a couple of cheese sandwiches, Bella, do you want one?"

"I don't think she can eat cheese. Or bread." I say in a stage whisper.

He grins and shakes his head. "I've given up on them, they have to fend for themselves. Sit down, at least I can make one for you." He's getting out the cheese grater. I sit back down.

"Um…OK," I say, stiffly.

"So, Bella…how's it going?" He sounds a little stiff and awkward himself.

I've noticed over the last couple of days that Emmett's been acting a little funny. He hasn't seemed p.o.'d or anything, but he hasn't really been saying much to me. He seems kind of thoughtful. It's making me nervous.

"Fine."

"I heard you went over to Bainbridge by yourself today?" _Great._ My latest lie is spreading like oil on water, and apparently Rosalie thinks it's so pathetic she needs to inform Emmett about it.

"Yeah, well, I thought it might be my last chance to go over there before it started raining every day."

"How are things are going with your classes…are you getting to know anyone at school?"

"Well, a little…it's really only in section that you can kind of talk to people…so, you know, it takes a while."

Rosalie sidles in the room to give herself a refill. "Any cute guys in your classes, Bella?" I flash her a wide-eyed, wrinkle-nosed "what are you doing" look, and she flounces back out of the room. This is the last thing I would want to discuss with Emmett, even if I were not sneaking around with Edward.

Emmett is putting the sandwiches in the skillet. He looks over at me expectantly. I guess he expects an answer.

"Sure, there are some cute guys, but I'm too busy to think about having a boyfriend right now. First semester and all."

"What about Jacob? It was nice of him to come out to dinner with the family. Is he coming up here again, are you going to be seeing more of him?"

This surprises me into frankness. "Uh, yes, actually, I have plans to see him in a couple of weeks, he's going to be up here for the weekend again. For Halloween." We had made the plan the night he came out to dinner.

"That's great. Bring him by to say hi." He sounds encouraging. This is definitely weird.

He slides the cheese sandwich onto a plate. I go to the fridge and get some pickles. "Thanks, Em. Um, do you mind if I eat in my room? I have a lot of work to do." I can't wait to be out of this kitchen.

"Sure, that's fine." He seems as relieved as I do. Why is Rosalie putting him up to this? I don't need her to feel sorry for me. Of course I wasn't alone, but I don't mind being alone. It's not like any of my friends back home really _get_ me. I had fun hanging out with them for something to do, but I always felt like I was watching myself with them from some detached vantage point—kind of how I was with Jacob.

I stop in the living room to collect the canvases and my yarn and give a wan smile to Rosalie and Tanya. Rosalie opens her mouth like she's going to say something, then she glances at Tanya and says nothing. I finally succeed in getting down the hall, but before I get into my bedroom I can hear Tanya singing, "She needs to _get_ a guy, I need to _stop_ with the guys." Her pretty laugh floats down the hall. _Why is she such a bitch?_

"You just need to pick better," Rosalie tells her.

I go into my bedroom, locking my door behind me. I lean the canvases against the wall near my easel, which right now is just housing the pad of charcoal drawing paper that Alice gave me. I have been having a creative burst this week on the artwork front. Maybe Alice was right about the connection between my sketches and sexual frustration, because now that I was actively trying to put Edward off I had gotten sort of prolific again. Alice and I had selected one of my sketches to develop into a painting, and I had been reworking it, still in charcoal on paper, trying to develop the composition before taking the next step of sketching onto canvas...but I also kept veering off into new ideas that stubbornly stayed in my head till I got them down on paper.

I set the sandwich on the bedside table and flop down on the bed to contemplate the afternoon. Well, I hadn't slept with him, but I wasn't sure I had lived up to Alice's admonishment to not make myself too accessible to him. I had definitely displayed some putty-like qualities in his hands. But now that my little dilemma was solved, I was having trouble remembering what the point of playing hard-to-get was… Well, I guess I had gotten across the idea that I wasn't going to be his fuck-buddy. That was the point. And he had asked me out for Saturday night, which, even if we hadn't said what we were doing, seemed pretty datelike. But at the same time, he'd made it clear he liked to be the driver, and things weren't going to go well for me if I tried to grab the reins. I think back to the dark looks he was giving me on the ferry, and the way he had stopped me from touching him…and the confusing, frustrating end to the kissing on the way home. It was like I told Alice weeks ago…he likes to control our interactions. Does that bother me? Maybe it should, but it doesn't. Actually, quite the reverse. Because even if he was denying me pleasure, I knew for a fact that he was turned on too, so he was denying himself pleasure as well. And for some reason I find that incredibly hot.

Lying on my bed thinking about this is stirring up all the pent-up frustration of the afternoon, and if I don't stop this is going to turn into a wanking session, but I kind of don't want to do that, because here's the thing…I think there's a hundred percent chance that Edward will be getting me off on Saturday night, which will be about a hundred percent more exciting than me getting myself off, and possibly two hundred percent more exciting if I just let myself stay frustrated until then. Just thinking about that is getting me all excited, however, so it's clear I have to get up off this bed and distract myself. I hoist myself up and take my now-cold sandwich over to my desk, where I attempt to settle down and catch up on my Jung reading.

But here's the problem now…during the meeting in which Alice assigned me this reading, she had given me an overview of how Jung diverged from Freud, with his theories of the collective unconscious and archetypes, throwing out in passing a few examples of archtypes…the psychological ones…the animus and anima, the shadow…and the universal ones, the hero…the trickster…the maiden… the vampire. Of course this last caught my attention, given my dreams and my sketches, and now I found myself thumbing through the Jung volume looking for any mention of it, and then flipping through the Joseph Campbell tome she had also assigned, and finally getting online to google "vampire" and "archetype."

I stumble across an encyclopedia Britannica entry describing a vampire as "a bloodsucking creature, supposedly the restless soul of a heretic, criminal, or suicide."

I find a passage from Bram Stoker's novel where Dracula forces his victim Mina to drink his blood, saying triumphantly, "Now you shall be flesh of my flesh, and blood of my blood"—which of course my Catholic brain instantly recognizes as a corruption of at least two sacraments: communion and marriage.

I find a scholarly essay focused on Jungian interpretation of the vampire archetype as narcissistic psychopathology, which in turn leads me to a self-help website listing ten ways to recognize a narcissist. Number two. They fear dependency and avoid bonding. Number five. They get nervous when things go well. Number eight. They create rigid personality boundaries. Number ten. They can't make a commitment. Number thirteen. They feel entitled to be taken care of their way. Number fifteen. They have to have complete control of the schedule.

This freaks me out a little, so I move along. I find another scholarly essay exploring the vampire motifs in _Wuthering Heights_ and _Jane Eyre, _and stumble over an assertion that "…In all vampire stories there is an unconscious psychic connection, a fatal symbiosis, a sort of psychic identity between victimizer and victim. In Jungian psychology, Heathcliff is part of Cathy herself, a personification of the animus that possesses her psyche."

After a hour and a half of this surfing and skimming, I am exhausted. I shut down the computer, turn off the light, and climb into bed. It had been a while since one of my Edward vampire dreams, but they are still vividly with me. The question I now have is, why was my unconscious, dreaming brain casting Edward in that role? Was it a deep unconscious understanding of him that my mind conceived on meeting him and being drawn to him? Or was it telling me something more about myself…is the girl in my dream my shadow, my darkest, most repressed, but at the same time most creative self…is the vampire my animus, my potential for masculine strength and action? Or is that all, like Alice seems to think, a parlor game. Were my dreams a simple processing of the words and warnings about him my conscious brain had heard?

As I drift off to sleep, I smile ruefully at the notion that maybe it wasn't Apollo I met that night in the bar. Maybe it was Narcissus.


	22. Chapter 22

**A/N: OK, people. Before you dig into this *****may I point out***** extremely l o n g (for me, anyway) chapter, please delay gratification for 2 minutes (only 18 hours left!) and go vote for **_**He's Lost Control **_**for Fic of the Week (!) at **

tehlemonadestand. blogspot. com

**Many thanks to Jenny Window and anyone else who recommended it! **

**Thank you and on with the story.**

"Oh, my friend is here." I'm wearing a short black satin slip and peering out the window of the dress shop, over the fabric shades which are pulled up halfway. The "closed" sign is on the door.

"All right, here." Laurent hands me the dress, which he has just taken in slightly on the sides to make the bodice fit more snugly.

"Thank you."

Laurent peers out the window. "That's him? Well done, Bella." He pauses. "Or maybe the credit properly goes to my dress."

I crack up at this. We'd had a funny conversation earlier in the week when I had come into work. I'd brought the bronze dress back, uncertain as to whether it was a loaner or what. Laurent had asked how it had worked out for my evening out, and I had told him that a few girls had asked me about it and also, I quipped, it might have caught me a boyfriend. I asked if he wanted it back and also mentioned that one of the seams of the skirt had loosened—not torn, but loosened—and when I saw the look on his face I went beet red and started stammering but it was too late. So now, of course, when I came out of the dressing room now to show him the dress, he nodded his approval and then glanced out the window and asked me if I was planning to rip another seam tonight.

"Maybe I should have reinforced them," he carried on in that charming way he had of talking that made it impossible for me to be anything except embarrassed yet amused.

"Too late for that." My phone was beeping. Edward must be texting me that he is outside.

The dress was a simple midnight blue velvet sheath dress inspired by vintage early '60s cocktail dresses, Laurent had told me. It was sleeveless and fairly short, midthigh, and had an empire waist with a satin waistband and a flat bow in front. The neckline was a high scoop neck but had a sharp little V-shaped dip. I loved the fabric, which was luxurious and absorbed light to look nearly black.

Wearing this dress hadn't been the original plan, and in fact Saturday was not a day I normally worked, but after Laurent had gotten a couple of bites on the bronze dress early in the week he had told me on Tuesday that I was to tell him if I had any plans the coming weekend and we would try the experiment again. Oh, and I should keep the bronze dress—he could fix that seam quickly, no problem. I protested this seemingly excessive generosity, but he waved me off, saying that the cost to him of the dress was minimal and that he loved seeing his clothes put to such good effect. He also told me should just consider it payment in kind, part of my compensation, that happened to benefit him as well. On Thursday he started working on me again about modeling for the catalog, mentioning that I would of course keep any clothes they photographed me in since they would be altered to fit me exactly, and he invited me to come along on Saturday afternoon for a shoot in nearby Interlaken park "just to see." This was interesting to me, to see how a photo shoot worked, so I agreed. There were five of us—Laurent, me, a pretty blond model, the photographer, her assistant, and the stylist, and the park we were shooting in was undeveloped and wild enough to create the illusion of being out in the forest. We were surrounded by tall, slender birch trees with grayish green trunks and golden leaves that filtered the light but did not block it too much, and the photographer and her assistant seemed to spend a lot of time fiddling with different color filters for the artificial lights to keep the girl from "going too green."

After watching to setup and execution of a few shots of the blond girl, the photographer, Irina, and the stylist talked me into doing some "test shots." I agreed in large part because I was getting so bored. A photo shoot, it seems, consists of an astonishing amount of standing around waiting while the art director—Laurent—and the photographer consider every minute detail, from the quality of the natural light to the shape of the trees in the background to the positioning or movement of the model's body and of course every little detail of the fit of the dress. They would haggle over everything, then shoot a Poloroid and spend another inordinate amount of time haggling over _that._ Irina paused to explain to me that most commercial photography had switched over to digital, but not all, because some clients—like Laurent—preferred the look of real film, which she said had a certain richness and quality of depth to it that digital did not.

"Kind of like the die-hards clinging to vinyl records."

Her assistant, a young blond guy in his mid twenties, rolled her eyes at me behind her back, clearly expressing his disdain for her anti-digital attitude. As if she had eyes in the back of her head, Irina continued,

"But, yes, Stefan, we're all going to have to make the switch, now that Poloroids are so hard to come by." She took a Poloroid out from under her arm where she had been warming it, unpeeled the image, and took it over to show Laurent.

Stefan told me, "You see, film and developing is so expensive, they have to get the shot figured out on Poloroid before they shoot film. But if it's digital, you just take a zillion takes and delete the ones that aren't working. And now that Poloroid's gone out of business we have to scrimp on the set-up shots. The stockpiles aren't going to last forever."

The stylist, Kate, who was a pretty-faced, appealingly plump woman in her mid-thirties, had me come into a makeshift dressing room consisting of sheets strung up over a tree branch, and got me into a pretty, relatively demure dress of a loosely drawn green plaid with strokes of yellow and slate blue, with black velvet edging on the wide neckline and a black velvet waistband that tied at the side. The fabric was, according to Laurent's typical M.O., interesting, with the pattern not woven into or printed onto it but, rather, painted. Keeping me in the dress, she slipped the straps off one at a time and took them in with a needle and thread as the waist was a little long on me. Before she started, she handed me a piece of thread and told me to hold it in my mouth.

"What?" I asked, thinking I had misunderstood.

"I'm superstitious. Bad luck to sew a dress while someone is wearing it. It's like sewing someone into her shroud." This creeped me out a little and I eyed her suspiciously, but she was focused on her task. After adjusting the dress, she turned me around and inspected it carefully, and called Laurent over to look at the length. He was fine with it, so next she had me sit down in a camping chair while she pulled out a red metal toolbox filled with makeup and supplies and proceeded to brush out my hair and pull it back with a narrow black velvet headband, and then made up my face, working down onto my neck and chest as well "to even it out" and applying way more gray smoky eye shadow than I was accustomed to (which of course was none, so it was hard to judge) but which she explained was giving me just the right "hunted" look. She handed me a cardigan sweater but said that for the actual shot, my arms were going to be left bare, and so were my feet.

_Good thing I shaved my legs this morning._ Of course I had. And plucked and trimmed and exfoliated and moisturized, until Jasper was knocking apologetically on the bathroom door and asking if I was going to be out anytime soon. (And, when I came out, he stopped as he passed me on his way in to whip out his phone and triumphantly show me a number in the "recent calls" window. "No way," I said, going into my room to find my phone and verify that it was, indeed, Alice's number. When he emerged from the bathroom I demanded his phone and scrolled through the "placed" calls to see if he had called her first. But no. "You must have called her from another phone." I accused him. He smiled and slowly shook his head. "Impossible," I said, weakly. "How did you do it?" "Sorry, trade secret." _Alice! How could you?_)

After more discussion, and Poloroids, and waiting, and shivering, and putting on the sweater, and taking off the sweater, they took a few differently composed shots of me—one placing my hand on a tree, lifting a heel, and looking back over my shoulder as if I was, indeed, fleeing through the woods from a hunter; another where Laurent and Stefan managed to hoist me up to perch on a tree limb, bare feet dangling and me laughing and warning them about my propensity to fall out of trees and windows, and a third take where the other model, also in a green dress, and I were whispering secrets to one another within a fairy ring of young trees. The whole experience was perfectly pleasant and definitely interesting, not as weird as I expected. Irina is very warm and engaging, making me feel at ease even as she peered at me through the tripoded camera's viewfinder and gave me instructions while clicking the shutter with her thumb using a special attachment connected to the camera by a tube or wise, and Laurent and Stefan were mildly flirtatious with each other in an entertaining way, although I think Stefan seems straight. When the light had faded enough that we had to wrap it up, and after I had changed back out of the pretty green dress and scrubbed off the stage makeup with baby wipes, with an apology to Kate, Laurent asked whether I could make use of the dress tonight.

"Maybe tomorrow…I have a special dinner." He raised an eyebrow. "With my brother," I explained, rolling my eyes and glossing over the fact that it seems Edward is meant to be at that dinner, too—though I have not yet canvassed that subject with him.

"Ah, sounds safe. For the dress, I mean."

"Ha, ha."

"No plans to see your new boyfriend?" he delved.

"I don't know if he's my boyfriend…or what." Wednesday evening still stings a little when I think back to the "exclusive or serious" comment, but on the other hand, he had retracted the "exclusive" part, and the "serious" part is only fair. How could this be serious, already? And aren't I supposed to be a girl just wanting to have fun?

"But we are going out tonight."

"Ah, what is on the schedule?"

"We're going gallery-hopping in Belltown." Alice had told me I should do this on one of the nights every month when they all opened in the evening, and I knew it was coming up this weekend so when Edward had texted me fishing for what I might like to do on Saturday I'd suggested it.

"Well, come back with us to drop off the wardrobe at the shop and I'm sure we can find you something."

"Oh, I wasn't hinting…" I gesture to my skirt and sweater. "I was going to wear this." I had spent forty-five minutes trying on everything in my closet this morning.

"Nonsense. I love to feel that my creations are having a tangible effect in peoples' lives. Let's see if we can't make you look equally delicious this weekend as last."

So that was how I found myself at the shop on Saturday night, getting fitted into the blue velvet dress. I had my pointy black flats and black stockings—or I should say pantyhose, as I told Laurent when he asked about them and he responded in horror that I should never let him catch me wearing pantyhose again, there was nothing to be done at this point but that I should acquire a garter belt post haste or, at the very least, some thigh-highs—but luckily he deemed my attire acceptable from the knees down, at any rate. I took a last peek in the wall-sized mirror—the dress has a conservative edge thanks to its sixties style but is very form-fitting and flattering, the plush velvet making me look more curvy than is technically accurate. God bless Laurent. I slide on my black wool coat, leaving it unbuttoned.

Laurent opens the door for me, leans in to whisper warningly, "He's not going to be able to keep his hands off that dress," and watches me cross the street to meet Edward, who is standing leaning against the driver-side door of his car, phone in hand. He puts it away as I approach and walks me around to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for me.

"Thanks," I say, kind of surprised by the high degree of chivalry and trying to slide into the car less awkwardly than normally. I glance up at Edward and notice he is looking at Laurent. He glances back at me, smiles slightly, and comes around to his side. Laurent is leaning against the doorjamb and smiling and he wiggles his fingers at me as we drive away. I wave back. Edward looks sidelong at me.

"So that's your boss," he comments.

"Yes. Laurent. He's French," I say to explain his name. Edward's eyebrows go up for a moment. There's something edgy about his manner.

"Do you usually work on Saturdays?" he asks, pulling away from the curb. His eyes drop, taking in my knees. I smooth the fabric of the skirt, while thinking that I see what Laurent means. This dress is so soft I just want to sit here and stroke myself. I smile at the idea.

"No…" I trail off. I don't really want to get into the whole photo shoot thing. Not only because it all seems sort of ridiculous to me, but I have a sixth sense it will _bother _Edward._ Not in a good way. _"I was helping with an upcoming season's, um, planning." It's not untrue.

He nods slowly, clearly wondering what this means, exactly, and I add,

"Laurent liked the looks of _you._"

He glances at me again, quizzical this time, and I explain, "He likes boys."

This makes him smile, and, it seems, relax. After a moment he asks,

"So, are you hungry? I was thinking we should eat something, to bolster our strength for this gallery-crawl. Are you going to be making me look at a lot of modern art?" he asks in a mock-complainy tone, glancing over at me again.

"I think it's supposed to be all sorts of things."

"How does Italian sound? I think," he says slyly, "we're supposed to be having Asian tomorrow."

So he _is _coming. That'll be interesting. And that's an understatement.

"That sounds good. I'm really hungry."

"OK, I know a place." He smiles at me again, and suddenly shy, I look down and stroke my leather seat and watch him shift gears. I suddenly feel strongly how surreal this is. I'm in Edward's car. We're going out together, by ourselves. No one around us knows, but we've come to an understanding. How did this happen? How _does_ this happen? It all starts with looking, with someone looking at you and then glancing away when you notice it, or looking at you a moment too long, _not _glancing away when they should, or you find they're carefully _not _looking at you, and then you start sharing these little exchanges that no one else sees, at least not at first…or for a long time, if you're careful…but they become riveting, these tiny little signals that tell us maybe we like each other. Maybe the person I like likes me back, against all expectations and experience. And suddenly you cross this line from being strangers to being something like friends but not friends, it's more intimate than friendship and yet you're still unknown to one another, and it's so exciting and discomfiting but not _uncomfortable._ It hasn't happened this way before for me. With Jacob, we were friends long before anything else happened. With James, I was more surprised he asked me out than interested on my own account, and the more I got to know him the less interested I was. With Edward, some things make me worried, but when we are together I feel weirdly not uncomfortable. I feel insanely happy to be with him.

He asks me a few questions about the shop and my job as we get across town to Belltown, and before long he's parking on one of those narrow old cobblestone streets you find in this older side of town, having to pull the car halfway up onto a curb in order to get it out of the street. Once he's cut the engine I'm unlatching my seatbelt and reaching for the door when he says,

"Wait," and leans over, kissing me on the cheek. I turn my head and smile at him invitingly and he comes in for another, still on my cheek, and next thing I know his hands are under my coat, stroking and kneading my waist and hips while his face is nestled in the crook of my shoulder as he kisses the side of my throat, finding a spot just under my ear that threatens to send me into a frenzy when I feel his warm lips moving against it. I'm thinking about how tantalizingly close that backseat is—although I imagine that twenty-seven-year-olds, as a rule, probably don't fuck their dates in the backseats of cars, when he slowly starts to moves back up, giving me a couple of lingering kisses on my mouth before he straightens back up and clears his throat.

"Hi," he whispers.

"Hi," I whisper back.

"All right."

Now we can get out of the car.

# # #

The restaurant is up a flight of stairs climbing a steep hill. It's small and intimate and out of the way and dimly lit with lots of flickering candles. Seems like the perfect place to bring your married mistress or other illicit date. I wonder who else he's had to bring here.

He asks the host for a quiet table, and as I follow the host through the front room and through a narrow passageway, up some stairs, and onto a sort of landing—the restaurant is housed in what appears to have once been a old private home—one of Seattle's rare Victorian houses—I think to myself that _all _the tables seems pretty quiet. But we have our own private nook, with a little window through which you can see twinkling lights and the darkness of the Sound. He takes the chair kitty-corner from me and watches me shrug my coat off onto the back of my chair, then smiles down at his menu when I catch him looking at me. I follow suit and look over the menu, which seems to be mostly in Italian, thinking to myself once again that perhaps German wasn't the most _practical_ language to have taken in high school, certainly not when it comes to deciphering restaurant menus, not that I'm usually eating in restaurants where the menus _need_ deciphering, but finally I sort out that there are little descriptions below in English including a lot of names of farms where various ingredients have come from and when I ask Edward what is good he asks if I wouldn't like him to order for both of us. I agree, thinking that seems easiest yet weirdly adventurous and feeling curious about what he's going to choose. He looks over the menu and asks only if I like oysters, to which I say, "Sure," never having had one despite living hereabouts all my life. After a few minutes the waiter comes by with bread and olive oil, and Edward orders a half-dozen Lopez Islands, which it takes me a moment to work out must be the oysters, as well as pumpkin ravioli with brown butter and fried sage for me and risotto with wild chanterelle mushrooms for himself, and two glasses of Pinot. Perhaps I'm imagining it but I think the waiter's eyes flicker to me when Edward orders the wine but I just look at Edward and the server says nothing. After he walks away, I lean forward and ask,

"Contributing to the delinquency of a minor?"

"It's only basic civilization, wine with dinner." He smirks at me as he unfurls his napkin.

"You like ordering for me," I remark, thinking back to that original lemon drop.

He pauses for a minute before answering. "You like my ordering for you." This catches me by surprise. _Do I? Maybe I do._

"Well, you seem to know what you're doing."

"_Generally."_ This sends my mind into the gutter, so I take a sip of water and get to the thing I want to ask him about. "Speaking of which, dinner tomorrow night?"

"Yes?"

"Are you sure that's wise?" I ask, exaggerating my taunting tone so he knows I'm joking. "Shouldn't you be unwell, just to be safe?"

His eyes flash. "I'm not going to let…" He stops himself short. "I'm not worried about it," he amends.

_What had he been going to say?_ Something about Tanya, I sense. Or maybe I'm just paranoid. I give him a little smile as I consider that he _still _hasn't broached that subject. Form here we get onto the subject of Emmett and his overprotectiveness, then he asks me a bit about my dad, and then my mom. That gives me a pathway into another subject I've been curious about…

"Do you never hear from your mom?" I ask him. He doesn't answer right away and I wince internally, thinking that came out less smoothly than I thought it would.

Finally, "No." His voice has an edge to it.

"That must be hard."

He shrugs and sips the wine the waiter has just brought. "I used to be really mad at her. Now, I guess I'm sorry she was such a coward. _Is _such a coward."

I forge ahead, bravely. "Did she leave when you and your father defected? I mean, what happened?"

He looks hesitantly at me, like he's weighing whether to tell me. He ducks his head and scratches it.

"She was supposed to come. We were all supposed to go together. My father had managed to wrangle travel visas for all of us, which was unusual, since usually you'd have to leave part of the family behind, as collateral, in order to travel to the West for something like that."

He pauses when the oysters arrive and waits till the waiter leaves to continue. I watch him pick up a raw oyster, loosen it with a tiny fork, spoon a little sauce from a small ramekin onto it, and then hand it to me. I hold it while he does the same for himself and then watch him bring the shell to his lips and tilt his head back, pouring the oyster into his mouth and seemingly swallowing it whole. I'm still holding the oyster tentatively, and he looks at me and smiles,

"Have you never eaten one?"

I shake my head.

"Just slide it into your mouth and try to let it slide down your throat…try not to chew it."

I'm feeling slightly dubious but I bring the rough shell to my mouth and toss my head back in imitation of him. My mouth is flooded with briny, vibrant vinaigrette flavor, and I manage to get the oyster down with just a couple of quick chews.

"Did you like it?"

I consider it—yes, if I don't think about it too hard. "It tastes like the ocean."

He nods.

"And metallic."

"Zinc," he says.

"Really?" How funny, to be eating _zinc._

He's picking up another when he resumes. "So the visas, you can't understand how outlandishly hard it was to arrange…when Romania was under Communist rule, day-to-day life was so exhausting. The things we take for granted, just every little thing, little luxuries and pleasures of life, you have to connive and finagle…just wanting the right kind of soap that doesn't dry your skin out or wanting to get a nice bar of chocolate for a birthday cake or needing to bribe some clerk or official to get any little paperwork taken care of or reservation made or _any_thing. Everything in life becomes a hurdle, and it does something to people. Anything you need to take care of, anything where you need someone to help you or do anything for you, _any_thing, there are so many people who become spiteful and throw roadblocks in your way just because they can. Everything becomes a power trip. Plus you're always looking over your shoulder because someone might rat you out for some infraction. And it got a lot worse in the year or two after we left, with food shortages. I mean, university life can be a little like that anyway even here"— he grins at me—"but it's just a situation that is hard to fathom unless you've lived through it or someone in your close family has, like my dad.

"At the last minute, there was a problem, and she and my sister didn't leave with us. Then they were supposed to come a day or two later. Instead, she dropped my sister off with my aunt, and vanished."

He hands me the oyster and there's a long pause. "I see," I say softly.

"My father was very upset, but he carried on with the plan. He really wanted it for us. For me."

"So, what do you think it was? Did she not really want to go?"

He shakes his head. "I guess not. It's hard for me to fathom what was going through her head, how she could do that to us. I mean, it's one thing to chicken out on defecting, that I could understand…and I can see that have been be a difficult position for her, being the spouse of a defector remaining behind. But it's one of those situations in life that tests your character, you just have to find the courage to do the right thing for your family, and she failed. No wonder she's never shown her face again." His voice has gone hard.

He prods his oyster with the fork, then sets it down and looks at me. He's on a roll now. "Though that's truly the hardest thing about it. How could she run away and never come back? If only for my sister's sake. Once things changed in Romania, why stay away? Did she leave the country in the end? Did she find a new partner, start over again with a new family?"

He rubs his eyes with his palms.

"How do you _do _that?" he asks me.

"Do what?" I ask, gen

"Get me saying things I don't mean to say." He looks at me as if he expects an answer.

"I'm sorry, if you don't want to talk about it…"

"It's all right," he smiles grimly at me. "But I don't mean to drag you down."

I shrug at this. "You're not dragging me down." I say this as sincerely as possible.

"OK."

"What did your dad say about it to you?"

"Not that much, considering all the opportunity he had. It was very painful for him, he didn't like to speak of it."

"How old was your sister when all this happened?"

"She was two."

I think about this for a moment…"You were ten?" I confirm.

"Yes."

_Oh. _"She's older than me."

"Yes. A little."

_That's awkward._

"So when was the next time you saw her?"

He doesn't answer at once, as the waiter is back with our main courses. He pulls the remaining oysters to one side and sets them down, offers us pepper, offer us cheese. We smile politely. Once he's gone, Edward replies.

"Romania reopened after December 1989. We didn't return immediately…since he had defected, it was complicated, and he was worried about it. The next time I saw her was when I was fifteen, and she was seven. My father was considering bringing her back with us to the US, but he couldn't deal. In the end, he said a girl needs a mother, meaning my aunt. Plus she looked so much like our mother, the spitten image, same exact eyes and coloring. He could hardly stand to look at her because it pained him so much. And my aunt and uncle were happy to keep her and take care of her, so it worked out well. After that, she and I wrote to each other often, and then I saw her again when I was twenty. There was more talk of bringing her to the US, but this time it was Esmé who said no, she was probably better off where she is. We were still in touch after that, we would talk on the phone, but things started to change with her. I started getting this sort of attitude from her, but I figure, it's adolescence.

"Things went really wrong when my father died—she was sixteen. She stopped wanting to talk to me when I called. At first I figured, she's upset over the death—I was planning to go and visit, I offered to have her come here, but she told my aunt and uncle she won't see me, and finally my aunt told me best not to come, she is very angry, but if I give her time she will get over it. I felt like we should be sticking together at this time."

He stops pushing his food around on his plate and takes a sip of wine.

"Anyway. Let's talk about something else."

"It's interesting for me to hear. I want to know about you." I feel a dull pain in my chest for him.

"Thanks for putting up with it. I feel like I can tell you about it, you kind of know something about it, the idea of losing a parent." He looks at me.

I nod but say nothing. His situation seems infinitely more complicated and difficult than mine.

"How are your raviolis?"

I smile. "They are delicious. Want to try them?"

He smiles and swaps our plates, forks and all, and once again I have a ridiculous thrill of pleasure at being entrusted to share his silverware. I try to think of something pleasant and gossipy and turn the conversation to the developing Jasper–Alice situation. He listens with a look of amusement, and finally asks,

"Why were you so convinced she wouldn't call him?"

I look back at him, purse my lips in an effort to repress my smile at his astuteness, and decline to answer.

Before long, the waiter is hovering nearby, trying to gauge our level of interest in dessert, but with a glance at me Edward sends him away, asking for the check instead.

"Enough of this. Let's go distract ourselves."

# # #

I'm equipped with a little map of the area I've printed out and marked with gallery locations, and we determine we can walk from here, so we head back down the hill and start hitting the galleries, many of which are housed in small brick two-story buildings that probably suffered decades of neglect before being refurbished for this purpose. Unaccustomed light spills out onto darkened cobbled streets and many of them offer coatchecks, finger food, and drinks. We wander from one to the next, this one focused on paintings, the next on photographs, one on artworks in glass and featuring a live demonstration of glassblowing by a youngish guy wearing a wifebeater and Dickies with a full beard and full-sleeve tattoos. Edward and I start playing a game of selecting the one artwork in each gallery that we would buy, if we had the means, and Laurent is right, he can't keep his hands off this dress. He's always got one on the small of my back or brushing my hip as he leans in and gives me his comments about the artworks and people around us, and I'm a little nervous about his attentiveness in these places, which seem so public not only because we are surrounded by people but because we are in these brightly lit, windowed spaces at night—but of course I am relishing every touch. I also notice how other women are looking at him—when I take a sweeping look around a room it's not unusual to catch someone studying him, and some of them don't even bother to look away when I catch them. It gives me a flush of pride, pride in being obviously _with _him, but also a feeling of wariness. I can see how it is for him. It's too _easy._

Finally, we're standing on the upper level of a galley in front of a large canvas featuring cream-colored swaths on white canvas that is eliciting some scathing commentary from Edward, when I turn my head in response to an offer of grilled shrimp to find myself in an eye-lock, between and across tops of heads, with a tallish, curly blond-haired guy…

Jasper.

_Rhymes with disaster._


	23. Chapter 23

Panic surges through me. I quickly turn to face Edward, my back to Jasper.

I must look stricken, because Edward immediately leans his head down and asks what's wrong. I flick my eyes over my shoulder and he looks up and spots Jasper.

"Well, too late…" he says quietly. "They're coming over."

_They? _I turn around and see Jasper leading Alice towards us. She's so petite I hadn't seen her at first.

My first thought is to bolt, but no, they've seen us. My next thought is come up with a cover story for Jasper—_we're not here together, we just ran into each other_—but I look down at my velvet dress, and back at Edward, who's looking pretty sharp in a black crew-neck wool sweater with the collar of a white button-down shirt peeking up and gray wool trousers—I know there's no way we can pass this off as a casual random encounter. Plus, I'm not sure when Jasper spotted us, but we're standing close together and Edward's been touching me so there may be no hope of passing this off as not a date.

I pull a face at Edward, and he smirks back at me and says,

"Try to act normal." Which of course makes me laugh, which in turn makes me relax, maybe not enough to act normal, but enough not to attempt to bolt. But even if I _could_ act normal, Alice and Jasper seem to be having difficulty with it as well. They've reached us now, and if this interaction wasn't so charged it would have been kind of funny. Alice is clearly embarrassed—she's looking at me and biting her lip as if she's been caught rifling through my desk or something—but she also has an excited glint in her eye like she's about to get the juiciest piece of gossip she's had in a while. Jasper, on the other hand, has a reserved, almost grave look on his face. I wonder if he's already wondering if he is obliged to tell Emmett about this.

I glance up at Edward again. He seems the coolest and most collected of us four, in fact he seems totally calm and, as I've seen before, impossible to read. He holds his hand up for Jasper to clasp in one of those quasi-handshakes guys do, and says hi in a natural manner, but that's all—he does not start explaining himself in any way, as I'm half-expecting him to do.

Alice comes close and gives me a kiss on each cheek, like I saw her do to Laurent, except she stops at two and uses the opportunity to say quietly in my ear that she's sorry, meant to give me a call about this—nodding her head at Jasper—before anything happened…she's not even sure how it came to this, he's very persuasive. I have to smile at this—the idea that Jasper's somehow _conned_ her into going out with him. I'm dying to ask her whether he also _conned_ her into calling him, but I figure this is not the time or place for that.

She straightens up, and both guys are looking at us, aware of the fact that she's hissing in my ear, but she smoothly asks me, with a glance at Edward, if I'm going to introduce her to my friend? So I introduce them in a perfunctory manner—"Alice, Edward, Edward, Alice"—worrying she's going to say "I've heard _so_ much about you" or otherwise indicate her familiarity with who this must be, but she does not betray in the slightest by her words or look that she is conscious of anything.

Then Alice and I both look at Jasper and he looks so uncomfortable I am sure she realizes that I'm in a sticky place, so she starts chatting amicably about the gallery and the artworks around us, and Edward gives her a few equally amicable, appropriate responses, the kind that I feel incapable of at the moment. I shift my gaze between them like I'm watching a tennis match, and finally gather courage to glance at Jasper, and he's looking at me and has a ghost of a smile on his lips.

Finally—it's just been a few minutes but seems an eternity—Alice makes an excuse about how they should be moving on to the next gallery, don't want to distract us from our enjoyment, and moves away, gesturing with her head to Jasper. Jasper allows himself to be led away, saying to me, "See you at home, Bella," in a tone that seems freighted with meaning—am I imagining it?—but nodding politely at Edward.

I have no idea what Jasper thinks, and maybe Jasper doesn't either, but I can't stop the anxiety from welling up. I watch them weave away, and then, once I am sure they've gone downstairs and disappeared from sight, I start pacing back and forth like a panther and shaking my hands in a slightly hysterical fashion.

"We have to leave," I insist to Edward. "Now."

He's looking mildly amused at me, but says, "Sure."

By the time we get downstairs and retrieve our coats from the girl at the gallery desk, Alice and Jasper are nowhere in sight, but I'm nervewracked as we slip out the door into the cool night air. We head without discussion back in the direction of the car. I've got a tape loop running in my head about how this is bad, this is a disaster, Emmett's going to find out, the jig is up.

I can feel Edward looking at me, and as we walk along in silence finally he picks up my hand, kisses it, and tells me to relax.

"Not much more we can do about it tonight, try to put it out of your mind."

I wish I could. "This is bad," is all I can muster as a response.

We reach the car. I'm standing on the sidewalk on passenger side, but Edward doesn't go around to the driver side. Instead he leans his back against it, looking down at his shoes and clearing his throat like he's about to say something momentous.

Finally, "Will you come home with me."

This _is _momentous, and my heart's in my throat, this is exactly what I wanted but now that I'm getting it I just can't deal. I can't put this out of my mind and compartmentalize it, I'm a nervous wreck.

"I can't. I have to go home," I say, miserably.

He looks genuinely surprised, and, after a moment, displeased. He doesn't say anything at once, but rather pushes himself up off the car, opens the passenger door for me using his key, and comes around to get in the other side.

Once we're inside the car he leans towards me. "Are you serious?" His is regarding me with a piercing look, almost glaring at me.

I nod unhappily. "I want to be there when Jasper gets home."

"Why?" he says, in a bewildered tone.

"I can't let him be alone with Emmett without talking to him first, or at least _seeing _him, so I know what to expect."

He objects. "But who knows, he's out with your friend—Alice—he might not even come home tonight."

"I think he will." Even though I was caught off guard with the phone call, I still have faith that Alice practices what she preaches.

"Do you think he'll talk to _her_ about it?"

I consider this. "Yes, probably. Or, at least, she'll probably feel him out."

"So she knows," he says, thoughtfully, his brow furrowing for a split second.

"Yes."

I know he must be curious about that, but he doesn't delve. "Well, will she be in your corner?"

I glance at him. "Undoubtedly."

"So." He shrugs, and his tone implies it's resolved. "I want you to stay out with me."

When I don't answer he leans in closer, his cheek next to mine, and speaks in a matter-of-fact tone. "You're driving me crazy. You're all I can think about. I want you in my bed. Tonight." One of his hands is caressing my stockinged knee.

I close my eyes. _Oh my god. _His directness nearly takes my breath away, and I am almost surprised to hear myself answering,

"I can't…you have to take me home."

I can hardly believe I'm turning him down this way, but surely he understands…I _have _to be there when Jasper arrives. Not only to talk to him or prevent some bean-spilling, but just…if Jasper's on the fence about what he thinks of this, it just seems better for him to find me chastely at home rather than out till all hours doing, well, he can imagine what. And this is doubly true in case he does inform Emmett.

He leans back, glares at me for a moment, and then starts the car. I can feel his frustration crackling in the air like electricity. I want nothing more than to oblige him, and myself in the process, but I can't focus on anything but tackling my looming problem.

We have another uncomfortably silent drive back to my house. This time, instead of stopping a block or so before we get there, he drives down my street and continues on. I wonders briefly, as we pass my house, whether he's going to try to kidnap me. But no, he pulls over on the next block, a little closer than last time.

He cuts the engine, puts both hands on the bottom of the steering wheel, and then turns his beautiful face to mine.

"Are you playing games with me, Bella?"

I am slightly shocked by this, and my voice comes out sharp. "No. I promise this is not a game." I don't like being accused.

He looks down again. "Because I'm _trying_ to do things right with you."

I'm softened by this. There is an unusual hint of earnestness in his tone.

I make my voice softer. "I am stressed out about this. I just need to go home and figure it out."

He looks back at me and says, coolly, "I think you're being ridiculous."

Why is he being so hard on me? "Believe me, I'd much rather be spending the rest of the evening with you," I say pettishly.

"No. You'd _rather _spend it getting into it with Jasper." He adds, "…and probably making the situation much worse than it is."

His tone is sharply disparaging, he is not holding back. I think he's being dickish. Annoyance wells up in me. Without a word I open my door, nod to him, and swing it shut as I spin around and stalk off angrily in the direction of my house. I refuse to look back, but I know he's still there because I haven't heard him drive off.

The driveway is empty at our house, but for good measure I call out when I open the door—"Hello, anyone home?" There's no response. I go to my bedroom, strip off the dress and leave it hanging despondently on my chair, and put on some jammie bottoms and an old t-shirt. Then I go back in the front room, put on a TV show, and proceed to not watch it while I fume over Edward's attitude and mull over what Alice might say to Jasper, if he does in fact even discuss this situation with her, which I am by no means certain of.

It's a little after eleven when Jasper does turn up. I hear a key in the lock and watch him open the door. He lifts his chin in greeting when he sees me sitting there cross-legged on the couch. He shuts the door behind him, throws his jacket over the armchair, and comes and sits down on the other side of the couch.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey."

I mute the TV and, keeping the clicker in my lap at the ready in case the front door opens again, I look at him expectantly. He shrugs and launches in.

"To be honest, Bella, I'm a little worried for you. I want you to be careful."

"You make it sound like I'm dating an ax murderer."

He smiles. "Not ax murderer. Ladykiller, maybe." I roll my eyes.

"Don't worry so much. It's not some serious thing, we just like spending time together…" I figure this must fall in line with what Alice has been saying to him, if anything. She's all about having the _experience._

He seems to relax slightly. "I was wondering if something was going on there."

_Crap. _"Did you really,'' I prod.

"Yes…kind of. I noticed some look passing between you at the club a week ago and then it suddenly clicked, because prior to that I always thought Edward seemed _annoyed _by you…it was funny, I kind of thought he didn't like you, I noticed him steering clear of you once or twice, or not saying hi to you when you came home on that poker night…but then at the club I noticed this _energy_ between you two that night that made me think I had it all backwards…"

"But Emmett doesn't know, he doesn't notice," I suggest, hopefully.

"No…" he laughs. "I think Edward knows how to handle Emmett."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, that morning after the night in the club…Sunday…when we were in the kitchen and Edward was teasing you, again I was starting to wonder about you two but after you left the room he said something…" He looks almost sheepish.

_Oh shit. What. _"What," I ask, tentatively. "What did he say?"

"Well, Emmett was talking about a burka, and after you left he was saying, do you think I shouldn't have let her run around like that…like he was asking our advice. So Edward was saying, here's my advice as an elder brother, you can't come down too hard on her, it'll just make her rebel.

"Apparently, his sister—he has a younger sister, she doesn't live here though—his sister has been acting up lately, getting to be a handful. But anyway, then he kind of smiled and said, he thought you had a little crush on him."

"He said that? About _me? _To _Emmett?_" Actually talking to Jasper in this way, I had been starting to calm down, but now I am wigging out again. I suddenly feel like I'm on shakier ground than I knew.

Jasper smiles. "_Now _I think it was clever. My reaction at the time was, oh, there's nothing going on between them, he is being so forthright….whatever I've noticed is one-sided."

I swipe my hand over my eyes "I can't believe he said that to _Emmett. _Now he's going to be suspicious of me, if he wasn't before."

Jasper tilts his head. "I also started thinking, when he was teasing you in the kitchen that morning, at first I had felt it seemed flirty, then after he said that it started seeming big-brotherish, like he was really kind of reprimanding you rather than teasing you…I think he's trying to get that into Emmett's head, that he's a big brother as well."

Jasper pauses. "He's a pretty clever guy. You seem mature for your age, Bella, but he's a lot older than you. I know Emmett would just be trying to look out for you. But I also know he can he kind of overbearing." He sighs, as if warring with himself to figure out what his position is. "Are you sure you know what you are doing?"

_Clearly not._ I appreciate his trying to not condescend and treat me like a child, though. I shrug and half–smile. "You're not going to tell Emmett, are you?" I deflect, sounding like a child even to myself.

He frowns. "I already told _Alice _this…" He rolls his eyes, as if remembering their conversation. "I'm not going to interfere unless I see some actual reason for it."

"But I do reserve the right to deny all knowledge of it," he adds, jokingly. After a beat he goes on. "Seriously, though, you should give some thought to telling Emmett. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as you seem to think."

"No. You know Emmett. It might be a lot _worse._"

He smiles knowingly. "I know," he concedes, with a nod.

He appears to remember something.

"You know about him and Tanya, right?"

I nod. "I heard all about it from Emmett…and Rosalie," I'm curious to know what Jasper thinks. "What's your take on that whole situation?"

"Tanya's definitely been needing to move on from that for a while, these past few months were bad, but I don't see Tanya as a victim. I think she got tired of their arrangement but he wasn't game to change it…too bad. She shouldn't have jumped into it in the first place. She's a piece of work, herself. But the previous one, now that was a mess."

My ears prick up at this. "Who was that?"

"Her name was Jane…that was actually how we started hanging out with Edward. I mean, Emmett knew him from before, but Jane was in the history program with me and Rosalie."

"So what was the problem?" I ask, restraining my burning curiosity and trying to sound casual.

"Well, it was similar, they were together but not together, which was all right for a while but after time it became clear they had the _worst _dynamic. She was very smart and could be a little bossy and know-it-all-y, and he would just shut that shit down whenever she got that way with him. He would be a complete dick. And that would just incite her. Maybe the make-up sex was great or something, but after a while we were all wondering why on earth they didn't just end it and out themselves out of their misery. Then he took up with Tanya, at the same time, and finally it all ended when Jane transferred to an Italian university at the end of her first year of grad school. She switched to a history of art program."

I don't answer right away. The mention of make-up sex is throwing me for a loop, plus I was wondering whether he meant that Edward had _driven _this girl to transfer programs.

"Funnily enough she even _looked_ a bit like Tanya, I thought he had a definite _type." _He eyes me. "Though it seems now he's trying out something a little different."

I smile sarcastically at this. "They say brunettes have less fun."

He smiles at this. "Well, they _do _say brunettes are smarter. You seem to be handling him better than either of those other two already."

"What do you mean. I'm not _handling _him." I'm not sure why, but this suggestion bothers me. A lot.

"Well, it seemed obvious you guys were out on a date."

I nod.

"Well, he normally doesn't do that. He doesn't take these girls out. He's not their _boyfriend_. Was tonight the first time you've gone out together?"

"No." I am trying not to sound triumphant.

He nods, thoughtful. Then he asks, hesitantly, "I don't want to pry, but…are you guys sleeping together already?"

I pause, then decide to be honest with Jasper. He has a lot of good information and he seems perceptive, it might not be bad to be able to discuss this openly with him.

"We've slept together," I confirm.

He seems satisfied by this. Or resigned. But more pleased than resigned. "Do you like how he treats you?"

I tilt my head. Yes, Edward was dickish tonight, at the end, but at the same time it was because he wanted me to stop freaking out and stay with him, so how mad can I really be about that? And he said some things… now that I've seen Jasper and things seem to be basically under control, I feel a sharp pang of regret that I didn't stay with Edward after the things he said to me earlier, about wanting me. He was laying it out there and I was so caught up in my own internal drama I couldn't really be present for it. _I've done the wrong thing. I've gotten it all backwards._

"Yes, he's been good. He can be a little… bossy," I smile, "but I think he's trying." I am echoing Edward's words from earlier.

Jasper smiles crookedly at me. "Still, for your sake, I'm glad he knows I know."

**A/N: Oh, my, I think I sense a complicated lemon coming on.**


	24. Chapter 24

**Public Service Announcement: "Perceptive review of the week" award is split between joyosix and WiltshireGlo. (Swino's been inducted into the Hall of Fame.) I appreciate their nuanced view of Edward.**

I peer at my reflection in the mirror. My face in the mirror peers back at me, pale in the flickering candlelight. The walls around the mirror are covered in small blue mosaic tiles shot with gold, giving the dim light a bluish cast. This is the most elegant, and dimly lit, bathroom I've ever been in, in one of the most elegant restaurants I've ever been in.

When we'd first arrived, Emmett, Rosalie, and I separate from the others, I tugged on Emmett's sleeve as the host led us to the private room Rosalie had reserved.

"Wow," I mouthed. He'd winked at me. The room we were led into was indeed private, and yet two walls were made of glass. One gave out onto a breathtaking view over Elliott Bay with the Seattle skyline as a backdrop, and the other gave onto a small interior patio with a Zen garden, prettily lit up now at night. There was a big round table in the middle of the room, which was dimly but prettily lit with lots of candles scattered around the table and some low light given off by sconces on the two non-glass walls, all of which conspired to show off the two views out either window.

Tanya had beaten us to the restaurant and was already sitting on the "city view" side of the table, next to her friend, who of course was an object of great interest to me. She was an appealing-looking woman, not as dazzlingly pretty as Tanya but pretty in her own friendly, open way. Her blond hair was cut shorter than a bob but longer than a pixie and tucked behind her ears, and she wore a striped button-down shirt. I was giving her the once-over as the three of us filed around to take seats at the table when I suddenly noticed Tanya giving me a stringent look, which made me drop my eyes. Rosalie plopped down next to Tanya, Emmett next to her, and I sat on the far side of Emmett. Tanya made the introductions:

"Bree, this is Rosalie…" Exuding tomboyish charm, Bree stood up and leaned over the table to shake hands with Rosalie and then Emmett, and she waved at me since we were too far across the broad table to reach hands. She congratulated Rosalie and thanked her for including her, and then beamed at Tanya, who smiled prettily back at her.

Next Jasper appeared, accompanied by Peter, also from the history department and whom I remembered from the barbecue. As they'd settled in I'd started looking over the menu that was sitting at my placesetting, and I was distracted from the food, which seemed to be a crazy mashup of Indian, Chinese, Thai, and lord knows what else, completely up my alley, but oh dear,

"Look at these prices," I'd hissed in Emmett's ear. "We can't let her pay for everything."

He'd leaned back, smiling, and whispered,

"Don't worry…Hale's Brewery is paying."

_Oh. _Rosalie Hale. Hale's Pale Ale. I'd had no idea.

"Ohh," I was mouthing to Emmett, when my eye was caught by Edward coming into the room. He looked at me for a beat too long, which made my stomach flip and my glance jump over to Jasper, who was looking right at Edward.

The previous night, after Emmett had returned home and he and Jasper had gone to bed, I had finally let myself go to my room. The house was too quiet for me to risk calling Edward, and also I was somewhat disturbed by this whole matter of his telling Emmett and Jasper I had a crush on him—frankly, I was afraid of getting into a further quarrel with him, and at the same time I felt bad about the way everything had unraveled and I wanted to smooth everything over and, for some reason, _reassure _him, and I was so confused about what to do that I had contented myself with sending him a text that simply said, "Jasper OK." I had to wait until I woke up the next morning to find a reply—"Thought so"—which left me puzzling over its tone.

Now, following Jasper's gaze, I glanced back at Edward, watching as he nodded at Jasper, then went over to kiss Rosalie on the cheek, and then hung his jacket on the back of the remaining empty seat next to Bree, more or less across the table from me, and sat down. He's dressed more casually than usual—black t-shirt, black jeans—which prompted Tanya to tell him in a mordant tone that my, he was looking dangerous tonight, and to watch out that he doesn't get mistaken for one of the wait staff. Studying my menu again I listened to Tanya introducing him to Bree and I stole a startled glance over as Bree told Edward she's "heard so much about him." I saw the sharp appraising look she was giving him as she said it—I guess she's not all blithe friendliness, though she's not being hostile, exactly, just sort of _sharp_—and then we were interrupted by the server, a slight young man dressed in all black—I saw what Tanya meant—come to bring some cocktails the other girls have ordered as well as a pitcher of beer, and explain that in Singapore round tables are always preferred so that everyone can share in the conversation, and likewise suggesting we order our meal to be served family style so everyone can enjoy all the wonderful flavors. Rosalie sent him away with some appetizer requests for the table.

Still eavesdropping across the table, I heard Tanya explaining to Edward that Bree had just returned from Singapore—she was leaning in and stroking Bree's arm as she told him this—and I saw Edward take that in, lean back to look over his menu, and start peppering Bree with questions about the food. I was getting more irritated by the minute though I couldn't say exactly why, and I knew I had to stop looking over there, so I blew out my breath in a whoosh and asked Jasper in a slightly annoyed tone what he was thinking of ordering. Jasper raised his eyebrows and gave me a "you made your bed, now lie in it" look, which made me laugh.

Peter, sitting next to him, gave me a little wave and reminded me of his name. I told him I remembered him from the barbecue. Rosalie leaned over across Emmett to ask Peter whether he didn't have a younger brother who was an undergrad. He said yes, he did, and she smiled significantly at me and leaned back, and I was hoping that was the end of it but of course Peter leaned over to ask Rosalie why she was asking and she told him she was on the lookout for a cute guy to show Bella around, and while I was mouthing "no no no" at her with a pleading look and once again _commanding _myself notto look across the table, Peter was looking at me and saying, why yes he was sure his brother would love to show me around, take me out for coffee, whatever, and then the two of them were starting to have a confab about it, when Emmett jumped in to tell Rosalie really, it's not necessary, which startled me but then I remembered my chat with him about Jacob (which in turn, I had realized the night before, was brought on my Edward's telling him I had a crush on him). And he had clearly brought Rosalie in on the issue, although I could not be sure whether Emmett had actually told her about the crush or had just had some kind of discussion with her about how I needed more friends my own age.

Rosalie, seemingly unstoppable, leaned across the table to Jasper and asked him whether _he _didn't think it was a good idea, and Jasper asked Peter what year his brother was, and it turned out he was a junior, which gave Jasper the opportunity to shake his head and ask me whether I didn't think that was a little _old _for me.

I glared at Jasper and could not help but glance at Edward, who was looking down but clearly listening to the whole thing, with an amused smile on his face. He didn't look over but instead turned to Bree and asked her something, and I immediately turned to Emmett and tried to grab his attention by asking him some bland question about his Halloween costume plans, and thank god the first round of food turned up then, and everyone was immediately distracted by the necessity of ordering the rest of dinner, which took place with a high degree of confusion. Then there was a toast to Rosalie and halfway through the appetizers Rosalie asked Jasper to switch places with her, so now she was sitting between Peter and Edward. Next thing I know Edward was leaning in to talk in Rosalie's ear, and she was looking at me so I knew they were talking about me, and my face was burning. Emmett continued on from the subject of Halloween to the subject of Jacob, asking whether I didn't still have plans to hang out with Jacob that weekend, and thank god he was talking about it quietly, so I took the opportunity to quietly assure him that yes, I did.

So just as the food (and additional cocktails) arrived I excused myself from the table and went to hide out in the bathroom for a minute because this truly was the dinner from hell. And that's how I find myself in this bathroom, staring in the mirror and wondering if I can splash water on my cheeks since I'm wearing mascara. I decide I can, carefully, so turn on the water, which runs into a sink that is more like a deep ceramic bowl than a sink, and the water splashes right up the side and I have to jump back to prevent it from splashing all over the front of my dress—I'm wearing the painted-plaid dress, which seemed demure to me in comparison with the bronze one and the blue velvet one but is also kind of low-cut, I realized as soon as I had it on in front of Emmett. If I could have cleavage, in this dress I would—but my breasts are too small for that, without some serious foundational garment trickery, plus they turn away from each other "as if they are shy of one another," as I once read of someone's breasts in some novel. Still, I like how you can see a little hint of shadow between them and also how the black velvet edging looks against the white skin of my chest. I carefully turn down the water and splash my cheeks, then pick up a little cloth towel from a shelf above the sink. There's a big wicker basket below to catch the towels. I give myself one more look and square my shoulders as I turn the handle of the door.

I come out of the bathroom, turning to close the door quietly and then stopping mid-twirl because Edward is standing at the end of the little hallway where the bathrooms are, fiddling with his phone. I have this moment of wanting to dive back into the bathroom, this feeling where I'm cast back into the time before I knew him the way I do now, where just catching sight of him sends me into such a tizzy that I need a moment to calm down before I can interact with him. But he looks up, slides his phone into his pocket and takes three strides over to me. He catches me, one arm snaking around my waist and the other going to the back of my head, and starts kissing me like his life depends on it.

My brain can't react but my body does; I'm standing on tiptoe, caressing the taut muscles of his upper arms, pressing myself against him, and kissing him back for all I'm worth. I feel like my belly's on fire, I want him so badly. I want him _now. _After the awkward embarrassment of this hellacious dinner under glass—by which I mean not that dinner's under glass but that _I'm _under glass—where I'm dying to look at him and must not—after last night, which started off with so much promise and ended with so much difficulty, after this whole frigging week, has it only been a week and a day?—since he was pushing me up against the wall of that nightclub and, oh my god, just the thought of what we did is turning me on doubly now, and I wonder if he's thinking of it too.

He doesn't push me up against the wall now, he pulls me towards him and leans his own back against the wall opposite the bathroom door, and slides his feet out to make our heights more even and slides his hands down my back and over my ass and pulls me tight against him, my hips against his, and I moan as I feel his hardness and I don't care how it looks, I am rubbing myself against him like a cat because it feels so good. And if I thought I was wet for him that other night, well, it's nothing compared to now, because here's the thing—all week I was waiting, and checking, and getting increasingly nervous as Day 14 approached I waited for the signs, thinking to myself, what if it doesn't come, what if this is the crazy month when the hormones go haywire—my rational mind said, relax, Day 6 is a reasonably safe day and all seemed as it should be—but how could I not worry some—however, since yesterday it's been clear to me that all _is _as it should be and I'm clearly not pregnant because I'm about to ovulate. All day I've been slippery, and excitable, just squeezing my thighs together gives me a pang of pleasure even if I'm not thinking about _him_, and right now my body's beyond excited—it's saying yes, god yes, the time is right, the man is right, please let's do this, survive and reproduce. And my mind is saying, through the haze of lust, I don't care what happened last time, you _have _to use a condom this time, for god's sake, Bella.

Now his hands are at my waist, supporting the small of my back as he kisses down my throat and along the neckline of my dress, touching the tops of my breasts with his warm lips, and I can't disguise how hard I'm breathing. I glance over to the entrance to this corridor and think how easy it would be for any one of them to round the corner at any moment. I whisper,

"We're going to get caught."

He traces his nose back up along the edge of my dress, then up the side of my throat. He kisses my ear. "Are you asking me to stop?" he growls. He's all heat right now, none of the coolness that sometimes makes my heart freeze.

I shake my head. "No." I may be crazy insane or insane crazy, but at least I'm honest.

"Good." He sounds curt and determined, and this melts me even more. He can do what he likes with me.

I glance over my shoulder at the bathroom door.

He doesn't hesitate. He catches my hand and with his other pushes down the door handle, pushes the door open, and leads me in. He pauses to lock the door, then starts backing me up towards the wall as we kiss each other frantically. Until something hits the back of my calves and I end up suddenly sitting, on an ottoman that I don't think either of us noticed. I start giggling out of surprise, and Edward is smiling down at me, but then a funny look crosses his face and his smile fades.

"What?" I ask, losing my own smile. He looks hesitant, but then smiles again, more slightly this time. His hands go to the top button on his jeans. He pauses for a moment, then pops it. _Oh my god. _I bite my lip and smile up at him, silently daring him to carry on. He does, deftly undoing the rest of the buttons, then pausing again before he pulls his jeans with both hands down around his hips. I tuck one leg and then the other under myself and, sitting up on my knees, reach over and grasp the waistband of his boxer briefs. They're black too. I look up at him questioningly and he nods slightly so I pull them down, having to pull them up and out first so I can get them over his cock, which is now rearing upright. From this angle, it looks rather intimidatingly long, and thick, rising up out of his neat little curls, but I manage to stop myself before telling him breathlessly how big it looks. Maybe he'd like that, but it would sound so ridiculous.

I wish, briefly, that I knew better what I was doing, but maybe it doesn't matter because I have such a keen desire to put my mouth on him and please him. I grasp him there, right where his foreskin has pulled back, and give him a little kiss on the tip. I'm wondering how sensitive he is—Jacob is uncircumcised too, Native Americans don't do that and apparently Eastern Europeans don't either, and Jake was always super sensitive there, plus he never really seemed to like me giving him head—he seemed to think it was beneath me, or something, and if I tried he would usually say "you don't have to do that" and pull me up. I never quite understood the issue, because I didn't see it that way, and I smile, thinking how horrified Jacob would be if he saw me right now. James, on the other hand, had been eager to initiate me into the art of this, but back then I hadn't really been into it and just thought it was kind of gross. Right now I'm not grossed out in the least, I'm all over this, and after I give him a few soft kisses and a tentative lick there, Edward says,

"Take me in your mouth." So I do, sucking lightly on his head, and he leans forward, supporting himself against the wall behind me with both hands. As I get more into it, taking more of him into my mouth and sucking and swirling my tongue around him, he starts to move his hips a little and I grab his hips with my hands to encourage him, looking up at him, which makes him say, "Yes," and he sets the pace a little faster. Then when I find I can't nearly get the whole thing in my mouth I grab the base of it and start working it in rhythm with my mouth and everything is getting all slippery and I let my other hand wander around, feeling his ass as he moves and slipping between his legs and caressing his balls, and all the while he's making little happy guttural sounds and his breathing is uneven and the pleasurable idea of his pleasure is egging me on to make it feel good for him. Every time I glance up he's looking at me, his eyes hooded, but I mostly keep my eyes closed and try to feel what I should do. Now his hand is in my hair, pushing lightly on the back of my head, but one push makes me gag a little so he backs off and just touches my hair and suddenly he's making a sort of surprised "Oh" when my mouth is flooded with pungent warm saltiness. I hum a surprised "mm" and try to swallow, which is rather difficult with his dick in my mouth and I'm afraid I'm going to dribble, so I keep sucking him lightly until he stops moving and then I slip my mouth over him carefully and swallow. It's especially salty on the back of my palate but I find I'm relishing the taste of it_, _also a new experience for me, because it's _him_.

I smile up at him, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand like a kid, and he sinks down on his knees in front of me and gives me a long deep kiss, which I'm _sure _none of my previous boyfriends would have done under the circumstances. Then, still kneeling in front of me, he pulls his jeans back up and starts to fasten them.

"Was that all right?" I ask him.

"That was perfect." He kisses me again. He's still buttoning.

"Um," I look down. "Maybe you shouldn't put that away." I'm wondering what he has in mind for _me._

He gives me his wickedest smile. "Oh, I think you might have to wait for yours."

I can feel my mouth hanging open as I try to work this out. OK, I get it, but there are other things he can do…just his fingers will be fine. Maybe his tongue, I don't have a lot of experience with that. I'll take whatever I can get. I lean back slightly, clutching my skirt and pulling it up slightly as an invitation, but he shakes his head slightly. He leans in and murmurs in my ear,

"I've discovered I like watching you squirm."

_Oh no. _He can't be serious. He clearly has no idea how bad I have it right now. He hasn't even touched me down there. I shake my head and start objecting, but he cuts me off.

"I'm coming over tonight."

"What? To my house? That's crazy. I'll sneak out. I'll come to you."

"That offer's off the table right now."

_Why I am even arguing with him about this? _I need him _now. _I don't care how long we've been in this bathroom. I tug up on my skirt again, slightly. "Please."

His smile widens. _Oh, he likes this. _He lifts one eyebrow and shakes his head, leaning in again to tell me in my ear to leave my sliding glass door unlocked. He must have noticed it the last time he came to my room. Emmett's room has one too, both giving out onto the backyard.

"You're insane," I tell him. But I can't suppress a smile—I'm having the weirdest reaction to this. I should be angry at him, I guess, at his galling selfishness. Instead I'm seeing the opposite side of the coin. Like someone staring at the famous optical illusion, yes, I can see the vase, but I am mostly seeing the face. The state of intense longing I'm in is pleasurable, and now I feel a new rush of excitement coming through me. He's teasing it out, prolonging it—I've been doing the same thing to myself all week—but at the same time promising to end it, only he's going to end it his way.

"I need to take my time with you." He gets to his feet and extends a hand to me. "Come on."

That melts the remnants of my resistance. I decide to let him take what I just gave him and let him decide what he's going to give me. I can't force him, after all. I put my hand in his, feeling mysteriously calm. His hand is warm and encompasses mine as he squeezes it.

He gestures to me to wait, pauses with his hand on the bathroom door, and then opens it quickly, peering out into the hall. He opens it wider and holds it open for me to pass through. I wonder what he would have done had someone been standing there. I have no doubt he would have sailed through the interaction, either cleverly or defiantly.

Once in the hallway, he releases my hand and gently pushes me in front of him. He leans in to say,

"Go back to the table. I'll be back shortly." As I round the corner back in the direction of the private room, he takes the other direction and disappears through a doorway at the far end. No sooner is he out of sight than I run into Jasper.

"Bella." He sounds pissed off. He hisses, "Is Edward with you?"

"What? No." I gesture around myself, palms up, showing him the empty hallway. "I was in the bathroom."

He glares at me. "You've both been gone from the table for a while. It's stressing me out. They're bound to notice."

I wince. Getting Jasper caught up in the middle of this and pissed off about it seems like a very, very bad idea, not to mention selfish. "I'm sorry, but really, he's not here."

He seems only slightly appeased. "Well, why don't _you _get back in there, at least."

**A/N: Oh, Edward's a piece of work, but you know what? So is Bella, it seems. But aren't we all?**

**Er, not anticipating that I can keep to the usual Friday update next week. I got houseguests coming, I have this freelance project trickling in and dragging on 'n' on 'n' on on 'n' on and the beat don't stop till the break of dawn, and oh yeah, it's Christmas… I know, excuses, excuses. Don't worry, I will post again as soon as humanly possible! Happy holidays and god bless us every one.**


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